Tribute garden in Mars G. Fontana Laboratories honors late wife of welding engineering alumnus

Students gain valuable experience designing living structure meant to inspire others

A budding project

Carolyn and Elliot Ross dedicated hours of work each year to their flower gardens. Curb appeal and budding blooms were cover for precious moments shared by college sweethearts who relished the respite from the busyness of careers and raising a family. With their kids grown and leading busy lives of their own, the color and life of flowers were a wonderful enhancement to their lives. When a rare lung disease stole Carolyn after fifty years of marriage, gardens became a reminder where memories of her flourished and ultimately inspired a one-of-a-kind intersection of engineering, architecture, agriculture, and art.

Their courtship began during their sophomore years at Ohio State. He lived in Haverfield House. She lived in Barret House. As the dorm’s social chair, Elliot arranged a ski trip. An empty seat on the ski lift was an invitation for Elliot to get to know Carolyn before they began their respective descents. As newlyweds, they made Buckeye Village home. Rent cost them $86 per month. Carolyn graduated in 1968 and began teaching in Columbus City Schools. A year later, Elliot wrapped up his combined undergraduate and graduate studies in welding engineering with summa cum laude honors. They eventually had two children, Katie and Doug.

Carolyn exuded light, energy and life – the same ingredients she shared with her precious children and homegrown hydrangeas. But the depth of her prolific flower beds did not speak to Elliot until after Carolyn passed away. Many discussions about how best to memorialized her blossomed into the concept of a living garden. The engineer in Elliot translated that idea into a living sculpture, and his imagination conceptualized a unique structure of illuminated flora representing Carolyn using light, color, energy, and life.

Giving back by paying it forward

Creating a masterpiece that represented the late Carolyn Ross would be a daunting task. The idea had been planted. Elliot foresaw a creation that blended cherished characteristics of Carolyn with opportunities to enrich the lives of students at Ohio State.

Education would be the thread that pulled it together. Carolyn dedicated her career to educating children. The couple credited Ohio State with the blessings of chance encounters, educations that led to successful careers and the ability to give back. Elliot introduced the idea of having a tribute garden for Carolyn to the College of Engineering by suggesting that students from multiple disciplines design the tribute garden with guidance from professors. A project like this meant opportunity, challenges, college credit, and giving back.

Professor Peter Anderson spearheaded the project during the initial phase. He identified project owners, disciplines and roles to translate the abstract into completion. Students from the Knowlton School of Architecture worked with students from materials science and engineering, agriculture and art to create design options. The options included approaches for a dynamic metal sculpture and a wide range of approaches to support live plants. Collaboration among disciplines took off as students from architecture, materials science and engineering, welding engineering, art, and agriculture discovered the creative process and benefits of cross-functional collaboration.

Ross was wowed by the interaction and creativity of students during meetings, “College is a hands-on learning experience, and the beauty of this project was to learn how to make something that works while collaborating with people with very different skills and viewpoints. They approached the project holistically just as I do with my work in industry. To get stuff done, I involve people from every part of a business – engineering, operations, finance, HR. Every successful project is the sum of its parts. Engineers especially must be creative, have intellectual breakthroughs, and pragmatically produce things that work with the help of others. Whatever they create has to have a purpose.” He shares that the greater purposes of the tribute garden are to help attract students and faculty to Ohio State and to inspire people to think outside the box. “The tribute garden will be beautiful, dynamic and enhance the lives of people who work, study and walk through the building.”

The structure will reside in the American Electric Power Foundation Atrium within Mars G. Fontana Laboratory, a $59.1 million, 124,000-square-foot facility that opened in August 2020 and is home to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Michael J. Mills, chair of the department and professor, describes that the building was designed “upon the premise that interpersonal interactions lead to new ideas and new directions in research and learning”.¹ It was fitting that Carolyn’s tribute be located in this space.

Mr. Ross has been a long-time supporter of engineering education at Ohio State. He is a member of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s External Advisory Board, and he and Carolyn established an endowment that sustains six engineering undergraduate students – two sophomores, two juniors, two seniors. As a student entering college with no financial support and average grades, Elliot experienced the stress that comes with managing a blended work-school schedule. Scholarships provided some relief after his freshman year. His investment helps students focus on academics rather than holding jobs to support their education, “I want to enable students to enjoy their entire college experience without having to worry about financing their education. This investment means they can become even more productive contributors to society.” Carolyn and Elliot never forgot the importance of giving back. The latest example is enabling students to create purposeful art by using contrasting mediums that will inspire onlookers.

Down to Business

Faculty members had their work cut out for them as they assembled cross-disciplinary teams, brainstormed, budgeted, and scheduled. A capstone project like no other provided faculty and students with an opportunity to push boundaries while etching their names in history as a tribute to the late Carolyn Ross.

Materials Science and Engineering professor Peter Anderson assembled the capstone and faculty teams in fall 2019. Those from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Knowlton School of Architecture and the Department of Design were charter members. Students from agriculture and natural resources joined the project as design and function began to evolve.

Despite the interruption caused by a global pandemic, the design team regrouped at the end of spring 2020 and worked on the final design throughout the summer before the tribute garden design was presented to Ross and the university for review. Architecture professor Justin Diles was challenged with refining the project to ensure it met budget requirements, while accounting for build standards of Ohio State. As with most real-world projects, adjustments and iterations required the team to be flexible as the design and function were recalibrated several times. “There were several objectives that we wanted to execute for the client. These included the presence of a living garden, use of kinetic elements and it being housed in the American Electric Power Foundation Atrium of Fontana Labs,” says Diles, who has a dual teaching role with Knowlton School and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The original design was larger in scale. The final design preserves key desires of Mr. Ross but shifted the emphasis to sculptural presence, which is less about scale.

Earlier designs used exposed nodes to represent a DNA helix as the primary structural element and incorporated LED rivets programmed with automation. Later iterations saw the kinetic mechanism transitioned to a gantry which moved up and down while taking photographs of the garden that would be transmitted to an adjacent monitor. Kinetic mechanics had a starring role in the tribute to Carolyn, and education was the theme. It meant future students could harvest data from the living garden – like growth rates, sustainability and environmental proficiency.

Lincoln Electric fabricated the backbone of the structure. “We used additive manufacturing or metal 3D printing to make most of the components and used traditional welding fabrication methods to assemble the components to make the base structure,” explains Dave Sterio, Director of Additive Solutions at Lincoln Electric. The additive manufacturing was performed with large industrial six-axis robots using a gas metal arc welding process at Lincoln Electric’s Additive Solutions facility in Euclid, Ohio. Amanda Dodge, Additive Engineer at Lincoln Electric and a 2020 Ohio State graduate, was in charge of the operation. Additively manufacturing the components took one week, while completing the base structure using traditional fabrication took three weeks. The base structure is made of 316L Stainless Steel and weighs 1,000 pounds. The final structure will be 8 feet six inches tall once it is assembled.

Professor Diles explained that students tackled a difficult challenge that included many variables and significant puzzles to solve before agreeing on a viable design. “Mr. Ross could have chosen to hire an agency with experience in complicated projects like designing and constructing a free-standing structure that incorporated water, electricity and kinetic mechanisms. Each element is challenging, but combining all of them is something none of the students had experience in. [Yet].” The point of the exercise was to offer an opportunity where individual strengths were used to create something functional. Something inspirational. Something that embodied education, beauty and life as Carolyn did.

The  formal dedication of the Carolyn Ross Tribute Garden is scheduled for July 23, 2022. The event is not open to the public.

By Libby Culley, Senior Communications Specialist, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

¹ Clevenger, Candi. Donors leave their mark on new Fontana Labs. www.mse.osu.edu. https://mse.osu.edu/news/2020/10/donors-leave-their-mark-new-fontana-labs. Published October 13, 2020. Accessed October 19, 2021.