5Do you want to build an Ice Castle?
Ice Castle reports that each ice castle is handmade entirely out of ice. It requires a team of between 20 and 40 ice artisans putting in “thousands of man-hours” to complete each construct. On a normal workday, the construction process includes creating between 5,000 and 12,000 icicles that workers then harvest by hand and individually sculpt into formation.
Once the icicles are put into place, they are soaked with water. The combination of wind, water volume, temperatures, and specific icicle placement lead to an ever-changing, amazing assortment of individual ice formations. Each of these towering castles takes two months to erect and spans an area of roughly one acre.
The LED lights used to light the castles are frozen inside the structures. They are timed to “twinkle to music” to add “a magical ambiance” to these icy interactive sculptures. Each ice castle must be built by a natural source of water. This way, in spring the water will return to the environment to be once more used by people, plants, and wildlife.
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