The finished whale breaching from a Bruges canal in summer 2018, with the city's historic houses behind it. Pale containers form its belly and blue plastics its back, roughly matching the colours of a real whale.
Skyscraper (the Bruges Whale) is a 38-foot (about 11.5-metre) sculpture of a whale breaching out of a canal in Bruges, Belgium, built from roughly five tons of plastic waste pulled from the ocean and Hawaiian beaches. It was designed by the Brooklyn architecture and design studio StudioKCA, led by Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang, for the 2018 Bruges Triennial, whose theme that year was "Liquid City".
From a distance it reads as a single blue-and-white animal rising out of the water among the city's stepped gables. Up close, it turns into a catalogue of everyday objects: laundry baskets, jerry cans, crates, bottles and buckets. That shift from whale to rubbish is the whole point of the piece. Below you will find how it was made, a photo-by-photo look at the installation, what the numbers about ocean plastic really say, and where the whale went after Bruges.
How StudioKCA built a whale out of beach rubbish
Most of the plastic came from beach clean-ups in Hawaii coordinated with the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, with volunteers from the Kauai chapter of the Surfrider Foundation also involved. Hawaii's shores catch a steady stream of debris carried by Pacific currents, so a few clean-ups yielded tons of material. In total the team used close to 4,000 square feet of plastic, weighing around 10,000 pounds.
The pieces were sorted by colour and shape, then fixed onto a frame so that pale containers formed the whale's belly and darker blue items formed its back and fins, roughly following the colouring of a real whale. The sculpture was set in the water as if mid-breach, with its head pointing to the sky, so passers-by meet it at canal level.
StudioKCA had worked with waste before: in 2013 it built Head in the Clouds, a pavilion on New York's Governors Island made from more than 53,000 recycled plastic bottles. In the project video, Klimoski explained the comparison behind the whale, saying that, "pound for pound," there is more plastic waste in the ocean than there are whales.
StudioKCA's short film follows the project from collecting plastic on Hawaiian beaches to assembling the whale in Belgium. It is the best way to grasp the scale of the clean-up behind the artwork.
The Bruges Whale, photo by photo
The whale arcs out of the canal with its long pectoral fin stretched along the water, as humpbacks do when they breach. The brick facades behind it date back centuries, a deliberate contrast between historic Bruges and very modern waste.
At close range, the white underside becomes a wall of containers: jerry cans, bottles and tubs that once held water, detergent or oil. Many still carry printed labels, including some in Asian scripts, a reminder that ocean debris travels thousands of kilometres before it washes up.
Children in rain jackets stand at the canal wall, dwarfed by the sculpture. Seen from this low angle, it rises like a building, which explains the title Skyscraper and the triennial's focus on how cities shape and pollute the water around them.
In calm weather, the canal doubles the whale with a mirror image. Visitors at the café terrace on the right give a sense of size: the sculpture is taller than many of the houses along the quay.
The waterline view shows how crates, buckets, baskets and floats were packed edge to edge. Several of these shapes are typical of fishing gear, and lost or discarded fishing equipment makes up a large share of plastic in the open ocean.
A detail of the fin, built from laundry baskets, colanders, lids and a fan grille. None of these are exotic items; they are the kind of household plastics most of us use every week, which is why the sculpture lands so personally.
Seen from a bridge, the whale fills the canal between stepped-gable houses. The Bruges Triennial places contemporary works in public spaces like this so that people meet them during an ordinary walk through town, not only in a gallery.
Early morning light catches the sculpture and its reflection, with a medieval tower rising behind the square. Like the rest of the triennial, the whale was a temporary installation: the 2018 edition ran until September 16, 2018.
What the numbers on ocean plastic actually say
The whale's own figures are concrete: about five tons of plastic, collected by hand. Global figures are much fuzzier, and it helps to know what they mean.
- "150 million tons in the ocean" is an estimate that circulated widely around 2015 to 2018 from conservation groups and researchers. Nobody has weighed the ocean's plastic directly; such totals are modelled from how much waste enters the sea and how long it lasts, so treat them as rough orders of magnitude.
- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a floating island you could walk on. A 2018 study led by Laurent Lebreton estimated it holds around 80,000 tonnes of plastic spread over about 1.6 million square kilometres, at a low density that cannot be seen from satellites.
- Fishing gear matters more than many people think. That same 2018 study found discarded synthetic fishing nets made up nearly half the patch's mass.
- Microplastics dominate by count, not by weight. Fragments smaller than 5 mm make up about 94 percent of the pieces in the patch but only around 8 percent of its mass.
The comparison with whales should be read the same way: it is a striking way to express scale, not a precise census. The underlying message, that people have put an enormous mass of long-lasting material into the sea, is well supported.
Where the whale went after Bruges
The sculpture did not end up as landfill. After the triennial it was lent onwards, and Utrecht in the Netherlands became its first stop, with plans to show it in the water in front of the TivoliVredenburg concert venue from January to June 2019. The loan was initiated by Marleen van Rijswick, a professor of water law at Utrecht University, with support from the city, the province and several partners. The organisers spoke of later stops in countries such as France and Japan.
Touring a five-ton artwork is not a small feat, but it multiplies the audience. Each new city can tie the whale to its own waterways and its own waste problems.
Practical takeaways from a plastic whale
Art like this works because it turns a vague statistic into something you can stand beside. If it leaves you wanting to act, a few steps make a real difference:
- Join or organise a beach, river or canal clean-up. Groups such as the Surfrider Foundation and local councils run them regularly, and collected data helps researchers track sources.
- Cut the single-use items you use most often, such as bottles, bags and takeaway containers, rather than trying to change everything at once.
- Support policies on fishing-gear recovery and producer responsibility, since a large share of ocean plastic comes from industry rather than households.
- Keep plastic out of drains and waterways at home; much ocean waste starts on land and travels down rivers.
Other artists use pollution itself as a material in the same spirit. Compare this whale with Nut Brother's Pollution Brick: Making Air Visible Through Art, which made Beijing's smog into something you can hold.
Sources: Design and photos: StudioKCA; Colossal, June 2018: A whale made of plastic waste; Wikipedia: Lesley Chang; DUB (Utrecht University), November 2018: Law professor brings the whale to Utrecht; Wikipedia: Great Pacific garbage patch; partners Hawaii Wildlife Fund and Surfrider Foundation.
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