A party of schoolboys gathered briefly around the edges of the latest large-scale sculpture to fill the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain yesterday morning as Eva Rothschild’s series of black girders was prepared for public display.

“It’s abstract,” said one, curtly. “Can you climb on it?” said another. Sadly for the visiting pupils, anyone found attempting to use Rothschild’s Cold Corners as a climbing frame will be hauled down.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, hopes to encourage visitors to interact with the aluminium poles, which have been arranged into 27 triangles, but only up to a point. He said: “The public can climb through [the parts that are near the ground]. We’re not going to stop them from doing that. This is always an issue when you have an interactive exhibit and you have to retrain people how to interact with something.”

Interactive art has had a mixed history in the Duveen Galleries, in the large neo-classical hall that stretches along the middle of Tate Britain. In 1971 art lovers were so enthusiastic in their embrace of an exhibition that allowed them to play with pieces of plywood and concrete pipes that it had to be closed after four days. It was recreated at Tate Modern in May to a more measured response.

Katharine Stout, who curated Rothschild’s sculpture, said that it was built to withstand touching, but no more. “It is not built to be climbed on or swung from. It is in a gallery, so people generally know how to behave.”

Rothschild, a Dublin-born artist living in Hackney, East London, said that she had to make alterations to her design, which stretches from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, for health and safety reasons. “There were one or two things that we had to move, but strangely enough we got to the point when we had to scale it up [from the model] and it turned out that there was not that much at head height.”

She observed that some tall people would have to duck. “But I think that they’d be used to watching out for things like that.”

The 1.8-tonne sculpture is not representative, she said. “There is no specific meaning. It is experiential.”

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010