FARGO, ND.- Plains Art Museum will host 126 students of North Dakota State University’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture from 9 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. on Thursday, March 5. The students will exhibit 121 towers made out of Popsicle sticks in the one-day exhibition in the Atrium of the Museum’s main floor.

The towers range between five and six feet tall and are all placed on a plinth that is 7.5 by 7.5 inches wide. The towers are all made entirely with Popsicle sticks and no connection has been glued. Colleen Sheehy, director/CEO of the Museum said, “It will be an impressive and fun exhibition and is part of the new agenda of Plains Art Museum to reach out to other institutions in the community.”

The idea for this project comes from Associate Professor Regin Schwaen and is made possible by the students he teaches in second and third year architectural structure class at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at NDSU. Schwaen said, “The idea is that the students create a structure with the help of a prefabricated element—in this case using thousands of Popsicle Sticks—by attaching each element with a detail of their own choice to explore similar technologies in the building industry. The Popsicle towers are ‘tested’ in their structural performance when being transported by the students from The School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture to the Museum.”

A similar project was executed last year at the Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center in Moorhead, Minn. last year during the Celtic Festival. A project in Jell-O, with the same 126 architecture students, was executed in the Fargo Theatre last month.

For more information about the project, please contact Regin Schwaen at (701)231-5793 or at regin.schwaen@ndsu.edu. Additional information is also available at www.ndsu.edu and at www.reginschwaen.com.