Why do we build Big Things?

Somewhere in New Jersey stands an enormous elephant. In New Zealand, there's a carrot taller than a house. A Canadian town has a gigantic Ukrainian Easter egg, and a Japanese fishing community spent millions of yen building a squid.

None of these objects needed to be that big.

An ordinary elephant-shaped building would still be an elephant-shaped building. A small carrot sculpture would still be a carrot sculpture. And a squid doesn't become more squid-like simply because it is thirteen metres long.

Yet for well over a century, people across the world have been building things at spectacularly unnecessary scales.

The reasons are surprisingly varied. Some Big Things were built to make money. Others celebrate local industries, preserve cultural identities, honour the past or make an artistic statement. Some have managed several of these things at once.

But beneath those different ambitions lies one rather simple idea.

In 1964, banana grower John Landi had a problem.

He operated a roadside banana stall at Coffs Harbour on Australia's east coast. Motorists were passing by, and he wanted more of them to stop.

The conventional solution might have been a bigger sign. Landi decided on a bigger banana.

With the help of engineer Alan Chapman and builder Alan Harvey, he created a 13-metre-long concrete fruit that opened in December 1964. It was impossible to confuse with a regular banana stall.

The Big Banana became one of Australia's most recognisable roadside attractions, and its original purpose could hardly have been more straightforward: attract customers.[1]

Landi was not inventing the idea from scratch. He had heard about a giant pineapple in Hawaii and recognised the possibilities of oversized fruit as advertising.

Nor was Australia the birthplace of the Big Thing.

More than eighty years earlier, in 1881, American property developer James Lafferty built a six-storey elephant beside the New Jersey coast. The elephant, later known as Lucy, was designed to attract attention to a real-estate development.[2]

A giant elephant to sell land. A giant banana to sell bananas.

Different centuries, different countries, remarkably similar thinking.

The arrival of mass automobile travel made this approach particularly attractive. Businesses on busy roads were competing for the attention of people who might otherwise disappear over the horizon without stopping.

A giant object could communicate what a business offered before a driver had time to read a conventional advertisement.

You didn't have to remember the name of the banana stall.

You just had to remember the banana.

But not every Big Thing exists to sell something.

Sometimes it exists to tell people where they have arrived.

Consider Ohakune, a town on New Zealand's North Island, known for its carrot-growing industry.

In the early 1980s, local growers proposed building an enormous carrot. A contemporary newspaper report explains their reasoning: they believed their town needed a stronger, more recognisable identity.[3]

The proposed carrot would carry the message “Ohakune: Carrot Country”.

The idea was inspired by an Australian town's giant lobster, which similarly represented its local industry.

The Big Carrot appeared in 1984 and remains a local landmark.

There's something wonderfully practical about this approach.

If your town is famous for carrots, you can commission a branding campaign, develop a slogan and put signs along the highway.

Or you can build an enormous carrot.

Australia's Big Merino in Goulburn works in much the same way. Built in 1985, the enormous ram celebrates the district's association with fine-wool production.[4]

These sculptures do more than advertise a product. They connect a place to the work, landscape and industries that have shaped it.

A visitor might know nothing about Goulburn's wool history before arriving.

They are considerably less likely to leave without realising sheep are important.

Sometimes a Big Thing represents something more personal than a local industry.

In Vegreville, Alberta, Canada, stands one of the world's most elaborate oversized objects: a giant Ukrainian Easter egg, known as a pysanka.

Completed in 1975, the structure rises approximately 9.5 metres and is covered in intricate geometric patterns.

Its origins are particularly revealing.

Funding connected with the centenary celebrations of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police helped make the project possible. But the Vegreville and District Chamber of Commerce chose a Ukrainian Easter egg because it could express two things: the Ukrainian cultural heritage of the community and the peace and security associated with the RCMP in the area's settlement history.[5]

The result was much more than an unusually large decoration.

It became a permanent declaration of cultural identity.

Big Things like Vegreville's pysanka demonstrate that their creators are not necessarily thinking about passing tourists alone. They may also be thinking about themselves, their families and the generations that will follow.

An ordinary commemorative plaque can record a community's history.

An enormous sculpture can make that history part of the landscape.

Some Big Things begin with a different problem altogether.

What if a town wants more visitors, but doesn't have a famous monument or attraction to draw them?

One answer is to build one.

In 2021, the Japanese fishing town of Noto attracted international attention after using approximately ¥25 million in COVID-19 relief funding to construct a giant squid.

The 13-metre sculpture celebrated a local seafood speciality, but its intended purpose was economic. Officials hoped it would help attract tourists after the pandemic had badly affected visitor numbers.[6]

The expenditure was controversial. Critics questioned the priorities behind spending emergency funding on an enormous squid.

Whether the project ultimately provided good value is a separate question, but the reasoning behind it is clear.

Noto's officials were trying to create a reason for people to come.

This is an important distinction.

A Big Thing might start as an advertisement for an existing business, like the Big Banana. Alternatively, the Big Thing itself might be the attraction around which a destination builds its appeal.

Once constructed, it can appear on maps, in tourist brochures, in photographs and in conversations about places worth visiting.

Of course, building something enormous does not guarantee tourism success.

It does, however, give a place something distinctive that it did not previously possess.

And in a world full of competing destinations, being distinctive has value.

Not every Big Thing is shaped like a fruit, animal or household object.

Some are built to communicate ideas far larger than their physical form.

Brussels' Atomium, constructed for the 1958 World's Fair, is an extraordinary example.

The 102-metre structure represents an iron crystal enlarged approximately 165 billion times.[7]

Why would anyone build an enormous model of a crystal?

Because Expo 58 was celebrating a world transformed by scientific and technological progress. The Atomium gave spectacular physical form to that optimism.

A conventional exhibition might have explained those ideas through models, diagrams and displays.

The Atomium turned the scientific idea itself into a monumental building.

In northeast England, the Angel of the North performs a different task.

Created by artist Antony Gormley and erected in 1998, the steel figure stands 20 metres high with a wingspan of 54 metres.

Gormley described three purposes behind the sculpture: recognising the miners who had worked beneath the site, marking the transition from an industrial economy to a new era, and providing a focus for people's hopes and fears about the future.[8]

Here, scale matters because the subject matters.

The Angel is not merely something to look at. It marks a landscape, acknowledges its history and gives physical form to ideas about change.

Monumental statues around the world have long used height and mass to communicate significance, authority and remembrance.

Making something enormous is one way of saying that the person, event or idea it represents deserves more than an ordinary amount of space.

Then there are artists who make things big for reasons that have little to do with advertising, industry or commemoration.

American sculptor Claes Oldenburg became famous for enlarging everyday objects into monumental works of art.

His subjects included objects that normally attract very little attention. Things so familiar that most people barely notice them.

Enlargement changed that relationship.

An everyday object became strange when it was many times its usual size. Its shape, normally unremarkable, became something worth examining.

And because the object was familiar, the transformation could also be funny.

Oldenburg's work explored consumer culture, everyday life and the boundaries between ordinary objects and art.[9]

His giant objects illustrate another purpose behind building Big Things: sometimes the intention isn't to tell people what an object means, but to make them reconsider it.

A spoon is a spoon.

Make it enormous and put it in a public park, and suddenly people are having an entirely different conversation.

There is no single reason we build Big Things.

John Landi wanted people to stop and buy bananas. The growers of Ohakune wanted their town to be recognised. Vegreville's giant Easter egg expressed cultural identity. The Atomium gave shape to an optimistic vision of scientific progress.

Those ambitions have little in common.

But the method is remarkably consistent.

Take something that already means something – a fruit, an animal, a cultural symbol, a historical figure or an ordinary household object – and enlarge it until its surroundings have to accommodate it.

The result can advertise, commemorate, celebrate, provoke or persuade.

And occasionally it can do all of those things at once.

A giant banana is a remarkably inefficient way to display a banana.

But efficiency was never really the point.

Making it big is how we make sure the message gets noticed.