In anticipation of its movie premiere, Sony Pictures deployed 10 sixty-foot-high Spider-Man inflatables at select locations nationwide, including these three at New York University, the Sony Building and Loew’s Theatres at 42nd street near 8th Avenue in New York City. We secured the inflatable figures with just one week’s notice.
The 60-foot-high, 34-foot-wide, cold air inflatable balloon has 22 attachment points on the chest side of the body. It is kept pressurized via a fan unit that sends air continuously through a hose to the heel. Though the Spider-Man balloon only weighs 400 pounds, the challenge was to resist considerable wind loads. Thornton Tomasetti devised a system that uses nine 3/8-inch diameter cables that fan out from left to right, attached to existing sign davits and supports. The cables are laid out similarly to…a spider web! Two cables drape over the parapet to hang Spidey from his heels. Our design simplified installation.
Project Stats
Location: New York, New York
Completion Date: 2002
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