Winter could not come soon enough for Brent Christensen. He needed Twin Cities weather to be cold -- freezing cold.
"I was checking the weather almost four times a day," he said. "It was very nerve-racking."
Christensen, 50, designed and constructed the Ice Castles at Mall of America, a two-acre attraction that opened Monday in the shopping center's north parking lot.
The frozen architecture more resembles a forest of icicles, with bone-cold walls shooting to the sky and jagged archways delicately hanging overhead. Construction was slated to begin in early December, but above-average temps pushed the schedule back, forcing Christensen's team to work around the clock to finish. As it was, the castle opened before some of the spires had reached their full 40-foot height, a process that will take another few days to complete.
"It's like being inside a glacier," said Ian McCabe, who admitted that he doesn't see a lot of glaciers in his hometown of Daytona Beach, Fla. But he does have a reference point. "It's like what you see on the Discovery Channel. It's very canyonesque."
Sue Anderson of Eagan was equally impressed, but her reaction came with a caveat. "It's a bit claustrophobic," she warned.
Ice castles are not new to the Twin Cities. The St. Paul Winter Carnival has featured frozen palaces in the past, but those spectacles were typically made of ice blocks.
There's no ice carving here. Christensen and his crew of 20 workers grow the icicles on "ice farms," a series of on-site metal frames where the ice can root and mature. They then "harvest" the icicles by carefully removing them from the frame and fusing the pieces with an intricate irrigation system. The build-out used almost 4 million gallons of water.
