The Bean (Cloud Gate)

Look up, and the city bends toward you. The skyline curves across a mirror with no edges. Clouds slide over the steel like water. And there in the middle stands a small, warped figure, waving back at you. It takes a moment to recognize yourself.

This is Cloud Gate. Almost everyone calls it the Bean. It rests on a plaza at the heart of Millennium Park, with the wall of Michigan Avenue towers on one side and the open sky of Lake Michigan on the other. It may be the most photographed object in Chicago, and people line up to stand before it every day of the year.

The sculpture is the work of Anish Kapoor, a British artist born in Mumbai in 1954. His design won a competition for this site, chosen over a proposal by the American artist Jeff Koons. It became his first public outdoor piece in the United States. Kapoor said the shape was inspired by a drop of liquid mercury. He wanted something that would sit lightly on the plaza, hold the sky, and pull the city down into it.

Walk closer and study the surface. Try to find a seam. You will not find one. The Bean is made of 168 stainless steel plates, welded together and then polished for months. Workers ground and buffed the joints until every trace of them disappeared. What remains is a single continuous skin of mirror.

The numbers are worth hearing. The sculpture stands 33 feet high. It stretches 66 feet from end to end and 42 feet across. It weighs about 110 tons. Yet from across the plaza it looks almost weightless, as if it might drift off with the clouds it reflects.

The official name comes from that reflection. Most of the surface shows the sky, so the sculpture becomes a kind of gate between the city and the air above it. Kapoor liked that idea. He did not like the nickname. When Chicagoans started calling it the Bean, he called the name completely stupid. He has since made peace with it. The city never needed his permission.

Now walk toward the center. The underside rises into an arch about 12 feet high, and you can pass straight through. Stop underneath and look up. This chamber is called the omphalos, a Greek word for navel. The curved steel overhead bends your reflection into rings and spirals. Raise your arm. A dozen copies of you raise theirs.

The Bean almost failed before it began. Engineers doubted the seamless design could be built at all. The budget said 6 million dollars. The final cost came to about 23 million, paid by private donors rather than taxes. The sculpture was unveiled in July 2004, when Millennium Park opened, though the polishing was not truly finished. The formal dedication came in 2006.

Consider the ground you are standing on. Millennium Park was built over working rail yards and parking lots. For more than a century, this corner of downtown was a trench of tracks and smoke. The park capped it with lawns, gardens, a concert hall, and art, all resting on a great deck above the old tracks. The Bean became the centerpiece of that transformation.

The sculpture changes with the hours. In early morning, the steel takes on the pink and gold of sunrise over the lake, and you may have it almost to yourself. At midday, the plaza fills, and the surface becomes a moving portrait of hundreds of people at once. After dark, the lights of the skyline wrap around its curves.

The seasons change it too. In winter, snow outlines the arch, and skaters circle the ice rink just beside the plaza, their bright scarves streaking across the steel. In summer, the Bean reflects picnic blankets, street musicians, and long evening light. The sculpture never repeats itself, because the city around it never holds still.

Keeping the mirror clean is a job in itself. Crews wipe down the lower band nearly every day, and twice a year the whole sculpture gets a full wash. Look at the lower six feet and you will see the faint smudges of countless hands. Kapoor expected that. A mirror in a public square is meant to be touched.

Before you leave, step back to the far edge of the plaza and watch for a moment. Everyone is doing the same quiet thing, searching for their own face among the reflections. It is a sculpture with no plaque to read, no hero on a horse, no story carved in stone. What it shows people is themselves, folded into their city and its sky. Perhaps that is why nobody can walk past it.