Kansas City, Mo. ? Happy birdies to you, Kansas City.

Ten years after the controversial Shuttlecock sculptures arrived on the lawns of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the museum is throwing a badminton tournament today to celebrate. Members of the public can play in the tournament or just stop by and swat a few birdies around.

It’s all good fun to remember July 10, 1994, when the four large-scale badminton birdies designed by Claes Oldenburg and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, were installed at the museum, much to the delight of some and the annoyance of others.

The white-and-orange Shuttlecocks, each weighing between 4,500 and 5,000 pounds and standing just under 18 feet tall, are now a landmark in Kansas City.

One is positioned nose down, another standing on its feathers nearly straight in the air and two others resting at different angles on the lawn, suggesting they had been scattered and forgotten after the gods played badminton.

And that was part of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s plan, said the museum’s chief curator, Deborah Emont Scott, who was curator of 20th century art when the Shuttlecocks were installed.

“(The artists) didn’t see the museum and grounds as just a plat of land,” Emont Scott said. “They saw the museum as a net across this large field, and said ‘Imagine the gods playing a game.”‘

Other inspirations were sphinxes on the city’s Liberty Memorial, its American Indian history, tornadoes and basketball nets.

The artists have installed large-scale sculptures of everyday items throughout the world, including a clothespin in Philadelphia, a bat in Chicago and a pickaxe in Kassel, Germany.

One of the Shuttlecocks stands in front of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. The Shuttlecocks have been at the museum for 10 years. Today there will be a badminton tournament on the museum lawn to celebrate.

Controversy followed nearly every installation, and Kansas City was no different.

The Kansas City Star editorialized that the sculptures were “silly pop art”; letters to the editor and talk shows lampooned them, and some members of city’s Park and Recreation Commission, which owned the museum’s lawn at the time, tried to block the installation.

Star art critic Alice Thorson liked the sculptures but editorial writer Yael T. Abouhalkan derided them as “silly,” saying they had nothing to do with Kansas City.

“It was fierce,” Emont Scott said. “They didn’t get the artistic genius behind the shuttlecocks. … It seemed very out of character.

“I think it made it very welcoming and light-hearted and added a touch of whimsy to the museum,” she said.

The controversy almost convinced Morton Sosland, a civic leader whose family financed the project, to withdraw the idea, he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press from England.

Sosland said the germ of the idea actually was planted 20 years before the Shuttlecocks arrived, when he asked Oldenburg to propose an installation. The artist suggested treating the lawn as a billiard table, an idea rejected by the museum’s board.

Sosland said he decided to revive the project years later when a sculpture garden was installed at the museum. He wanted something to encourage people to walk across the front lawn and around the building.

When the artists presented the concept of the Shuttlecocks, “I remember almost bursting into tears of joy with how successfully and excitingly they had responded to what we had asked them to do,” Sosland wrote.

Ten years later, Sosland is still thrilled by the sculptures.

“Today, my family and I could not be more pleased than we are with the outcome, and we hope that many, if not most, of our fellow citizens share our joy with the Shuttlecocks.”

While Abouhalkan concedes the Shuttlecocks have become a frequently-photographed icon of the city, he believes they’re still “silly little playthings.”

“I still think we could have had something else,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what, but we should have had something else.”