It took New York City two years to build the art deco Chrysler Building. Artic Diamond’s sculptor John Michael did it in about two hours.

His rendition will join crystal-clear reproductions of the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Mount Rushmore and more than 70 other ice sculptures that will line High Street Jan. 18 and 19 for the eighth rendition of IceFest, with the theme “Landmarks of the World.”

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Regional and local landmarks to be recreated in ice for the “street pieces” include Union Terminal, the Tyler Davidson Fountain, the Lane-Hooven House, the Lane Library building and Billy Yank, the figure atop the Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers Monument.

“The landmark concept is a unique ice festival idea,” said Brady Lantz, owner of Artic Diamond, the company that is doing all the advance sculpting for IceFest, noting that similar festivals rarely have any kind of a theme.

“It’s usually ‘sponsor’s choice,’ so you end up doing a lot of company logos,” he said. “Doing a themed show gives us a variety of options for sponsors to choose from, and gives us a chance to carve stuff we’ve never carved before — and probably will never carve again.

“I hope the people of Hamilton are as excited about this as we are,” he said. “Doing the local pieces helps give the festival a hometown spirit, and a lot of people who come from Cincinnati will be interested in seeing some of their landmarks carved in ice.”

Artic Diamond’s four sculptors, three of them residents of Butler County, began work last week to create the 75 — and counting, as they expect some last-minute orders — sculptures, which also include logo pieces and other special non-thematic requests in addition to the landmarks.

“Hamilton is an artsy city and we’re artsy people, so we love working in our own community,” Lantz said.

Previous IceFests have drawn between 20,000 and 30,000 people, but Lantz thinks that this year will be an even bigger draw based on the number of phone calls he’s gotten from people.

“We know people missed it when it was gone,” he said. “When we took the hiatus in 2010, a lot of people were still calling and asking us about it.”

Artic Diamond will use about 150 300-pound blocks of ice to create the street pieces and 10 competition sculptures, which will feature work from seven of the nation’s best ice artists and three student competitors from Oakland Community College in Michigan, who will be qualifying for the National Collegiate Finals.

Lantz said they make most of their own ice in special freezers that use filtered tap water and pumps inside the freezers that keep the water moving to help keep the blocks crystal-clear as the ice hardens from the bottom up.

“If the water is moving, then the impurities will all float to the top and we siphon off the top three inches of water,” he said. “If we used Hamilton tap water, we could probably have clear blocks without doing all that.”