Vegreville Pysanka

Vegreville built this in 1975 to mark the centennial of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and to honour the district's Ukrainian settlers, and the engineering turned out to be a landmark in its own right. A pysanka is a wax-resist decorated Easter egg, and translating the curved geometric pattern onto a three-dimensional shell of over three thousand aluminium tiles was beyond hand calculation; Ronald Resch, a computer scientist at the University of Utah, solved it, and the result is generally described as the first physical structure designed using computer modelling. It is nine metres long, turns in the wind on a bearing, and weighs about two and a half tonnes.

What you actually see

• The nine-metre egg - over three thousand aluminium tiles in a geometric pattern.
• The wind bearing - the whole structure turns to face into the wind.
• The computer modelling story - the first physical object designed this way.
• The Ukrainian pattern - a traditional pysanka design scaled to a monument.

When to go

May to September; the park around it is pleasant in summer and the Ukrainian Pysanka Festival runs in July. The egg is visible year-round from the highway.

Honest expectations

It is a roadside monument and takes fifteen minutes. The town is small with limited reasons to stay. Its main interest is the engineering story rather than the object itself.

Nearby

The Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village lies west; Edmonton is beyond it.