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The Crown Fountain at Chicago's
Millennium Park Modern-day photographs of the great City of Chicago. Millennium Park is located in the heart of downtown Chicago. It is bordered by Michigan Avenue to the west, Columbus Drive to the east, Randolph Street to the North and Monroe Street to the South. The park is open daily from 6am - 11pm. Admission is always free. Visitors to the Millennium Park are encouraged to make the Millennium Park Welcome Center their first stop. The Welcome Center is located at 201 E. Randolph Street. |
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Designed by
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa and inspired by the people of
Chicago, The Crown Fountain is a major addition to the city's
world-renowned public art collection. The fountain
consists of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a
shallow reflecting pool. The towers project video images from a
broad social spectrum of Chicago citizens, a reference to the
traditional use of gargoyles in fountains, where faces of
mythological beings were sculpted with open mouths to allow
water, a symbol of life, to flow out. Plensa adapted this
practice by having faces of Chicago citizens projected on LED
screens and having water flow through a water outlet in the
screen to give the illusion of water spouting from their mouths.
The collection of faces, Plensa's tribute to Chicagoans, was
taken from a cross-section of 1,000 residents. The fountain, which anchors the southwest corner of Millennium Park at Michigan Avenue and Monroe Streets, is a favorite of both children and families. The water is on from mid-spring through mid-fall each year (weather permitting,) while the images remain on year-round. |
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| The
designers and engineers working on construction of the glass
block towers had to figure out how to add a fountain to each of
the structures without disrupting the visual effect. In what the
project team calls the "gargoyle" feature, the faces on the two
screens pucker up and spout water every 3 minutes. The team did
not want pipes to protrude from the towers, and they didn’t want
to remove LEDs in the mouth area because it would have looked
like the face was missing a tooth. Instead, the team decided to
recess one LED tile in each tower about 6 inches and install
1-inch clear tubing from which to issue the water deluge. Wind gauges at the tops of the towers register wind speed and gusts, important because the gargoyle feature must be turned off when it’s too windy. Staff members at the Art Institute of Chicago filmed more than 1,000 faces for the displays. Each of those face images are individual files stored on computer hard drives. The files have data that dictate when the face will pucker, if weather conditions permit, when to turn on and off the water, etc. |
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 Looking north to Prudential Building and "The Bean" |
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| The 550 square foot
control room is located underground, beneath one of the towers.
Features include high-definition video servers and sensors that
monitor equipment temperatures. Although the programs run
automatically, features such as the synchronization of images,
water flow, and lighting color and intensity can be controlled
remotely. A pump room located under each tower draws water from
a reservoir under the reflecting pool to supply the waterfalls
and wash down the LED display when the face, nature scene, or
shape disappears. Each pump circuit is designed to filter the
sand out of the water (waders in the reflecting pool track
hundreds of pounds of sand daily into the water) before sending
it back to the fountain. |
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| Please visit our pages on other Chicago and suburban landmarks. |
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