Exhibits include an eight-foot-long rotor, half of a hundred-and-fifty-ton truck, and a pump of Brobdingnagian proportions.

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But head inland into Queensland and into the outback and the contrast cannot get sharper: Giant excavators, three stories high and weighing hundreds of tonnes, work at mines of Brobdingnagian proportions.

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Squat and black, like some evil shoebox, the machine weighs a Brobdingnagian 8 pounds, not only heavier than the other game consoles but probably most VCRs and DVD players as well.

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Vornado owns Chicago's Brobdingnagian exhibit facility, the Merchandise Mart.

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Flip through the Seattle architect's portfolio and you'll see roofs that levitate on muscular pistons, angular cabins that roll across an alpine valley on wheeled stilts and Brobdingnagian hand cranks that swivel six-ton window walls.

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Robert Morris's walk-in "Labyrinth" and 25-by-33-foot "Aluminum I-Beams Construction" and a floor piece by Carl Andre also fit handily, as does Claes Oldenburg's Brobdingnagian, brilliant-red "Knife Ship, " its motorized oars rowing and its knife blades rising and lowering at the gallery's far end.

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Yes, a few journalists, including me, have shed some light on how they managed to build and pass along such Brobdingnagian wealth from one generation to the next and the next. (Currently, 10 members of the Pritzker clan, including Penny, are individually rich enough to be on the Forbes 400 list.) But the family has remained largely mute on the subject.

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