Sculpture Facts

Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant tile mason, spent 33 years building the Watts Towers in Los Angeles entirely by hand - no machines, no scaffolding, no bolts, no welds, no blueprints. His only tools were pipe-fitter pliers and a window-washer belt. The tallest spire reaches 99 feet. When he finished in 1954, he deeded the land to a neighbor, boarded a bus, and never came back.

Nek Chand was an Indian roads inspector who began secretly building a garden in a forbidden forest gorge around 1965. He hid thousands of sculptures there for about a decade, made from broken bangles, tiles and factory waste. Officials discovered it in 1975 and could have torn it down. Instead they gave him a salary and 50 workers. The Rock Garden now covers 40 acres with over 5,000 statues.

The Bean in Chicago's Millennium Park is really Cloud Gate, 168 stainless-steel plates welded into one seamless, 110-ton mirror. Every day the park is open, a small crew hand-wipes its base to strip off the fingerprints and oils that would corrode the finish. Twice a year another crew scaffolds the whole sculpture overnight for a full wash and polish. The wipe-down crew is still out there, cloths in hand.