Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Wednesday Search Challenge (Feb 16, 2011): The horse statue near Google?

I'll tell you a little secret:  Near one of the Google buildings in Mountain View is a statue of a horse. 


The challenge is in four parts: 


1.  Where, exactly, is the horse?  (Lat/Long will do, or a street address, if you'd like) 


2.  What is the horse statue made of? 


3.  Can you find a picture of the horse taken towards the west so you can see what angle the head is held at?  




Why all these funny challenge questions?  Answer, I really like the horse.  And besides, when I took my daughter there on a little walk a while back when she was 10, she recognized the style of the statue and gave me the sculptor's name.  I couldn't do that.  Can you? 


4.  Who is the sculptor?  






Search on! 



4 comments:

  1. I started with [sculpture horse "mountain view"] in Google Images then [sculpture horse "mountain view" google] and finally [sculpture +horse "mountain view" google] to make me pretty sure this was the horse http://www.flickr.com/photos/jason-morrison/2349477356/ This picture is also shot looking west for to show the angle of the head.

    The photographer of the photo included geolocation so I went to the map and found that it was in a park along Crittenden Lane and N. Shoreline Blvd.

    This is where I probably took the long way round to get the info, if so hopefully someone will share a shortcut.

    The route I took was open Google Earth and search for [Crittenden ln., Mountain View, CA] then turned on photos. That got me this image in Panoramio http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3900558

    It looked like it was made of wood so did an image search for [sculpture horse google wooden] and found a picture of a woman standing between two sculptures like the one we were looking for. It took me to http://thepirata.com/stunning-life-like-horse-sculptures-made-entirely-of-driftwood/

    Then searched for [artist Heather Jansch] to here http://www.heatherjansch.com/index.php

    So I think I have everything:
    1. Where 37° 25' 30.53" N 122° 4' 25.94" W from the Panoramio picture

    2. Although it looks like wood and the artist does work in both wood and bronze, I'm going with bronze based on the tags on the Flickr photo.

    3. The Flickr photo was taken at sunset so toward the west and the head is down a bit.

    4. The artist is Heather Jansch.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1. Where, exactly, is the horse? (Lat/Long will do, or a street address, if you'd like)
    Adress: Crittenden Lane, Mountain View, California, United States
    Exact location: 37.42519,-122.073865


    2. What is the horse statue made of? Bronze ("Cast Bronze Horse")


    3. Can you find a picture of the horse taken towards the west so you can see what angle the head is held at? http://www.flickr.com/photos/splitp_com/4487870180/ or a view from google streetview tells its head is facing north-east: http://maps.google.nl/maps?ll=37.424895,-122.073481&spn=0,0.0006&t=h&z=21&lci=com.panoramio.all&layer=c&cbll=37.424895,-122.073351&panoid=GAJyO98Rj6PxFyPwOY8FiA&cbp=12,327.17,,0,8.28


    4. Who is the sculptor? Deborah Butterfield (By Deborah Butterfield (2001), a gift to the people of Mountain View from SGI)

    The start of my search was at Flickr (search for sculpture near google in flickr). The picture i found was tagged with a location on a map.

    ReplyDelete
  3. With the information from Fred Delventhal and Daniel Drittij I have found on wikimapia [http://wikimapia.org/3333698/Public-Art-Sculpture-by-Deborah-Butterfield ] a picture from the ornamental plate on the sculpture [http://wikimapia.org/p/00/00/17/33/87_big.jpg ] so it is for sure Deborah Butterfield who made the sculpture.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I know exactly where I went wrong, darn it. When I found the the artist Heather Jansch my next move was to try to find the Mountain View horse. Went through her gallery and didn't find it. Thought about trying to contact her through either email or twitter.

    I was running out of time on my lunch hour so just went with her as the answer. The wrong answer it turns out.

    Thanks, this was a good one!

    ReplyDelete