Crown Fountain

Listen first. Under the traffic noise of Michigan Avenue there is a soft, constant hiss of falling water. Then come the voices of children, shrieking and laughing as they splash across a sheet of dark stone. Feel the air near the towers. On a warm day it is cooler here, damp with spray. And look up. A giant face is looking back at you, calm and patient, as if it has been waiting for you to arrive.

Welcome to Crown Fountain, at the southwest corner of Millennium Park in Chicago. It opened in 2004, together with the park itself. Two tall towers stand at either end of a long, shallow pool. They are built from glass blocks, and behind that glass, screens show moving images. Most of the time those images are faces. Real faces, of real people from this city, many times larger than life.

The artist behind the work is Jaume Plensa, a sculptor from Barcelona in Catalonia, the region in northeastern Spain. Plensa is known around the world for work about people and identity. He often uses heads, faces, and letters of the alphabet. Here in Chicago he took a very old idea, the public fountain, and asked a simple question. What if the fountain did not show a god or a hero, but your neighbour?

Think about the fountains of old European squares. Water pours from the mouths of stone lions, sea creatures, or carved gargoyles, the grotesque figures on medieval churches. Plensa borrowed that tradition directly. Stay and watch one of the faces for a few minutes. At some point the lips will purse, as if the person is about to whistle. Then a jet of water shoots out from the mouth and arcs down into the pool. The crowd below usually cheers.

Here is something many visitors miss. The faces are not actors or celebrities. Plensa and his team filmed around a thousand ordinary Chicagoans for the project. The idea was to reflect the whole city, across ages, backgrounds, and neighbourhoods. So the person smiling down at you might be a teacher, a retiree, a student, or a bus driver. Somewhere in this city, they may still be living their lives, unaware that strangers are looking at them right now.

Now look closely at the towers themselves. From a distance they seem solid. Up close, you can see they are made of thousands of separate glass blocks, stacked like bricks. The glass softens the images behind it, so the faces look slightly dreamlike. Water runs down the tower walls, too, and that moving film of water adds another layer of shimmer. In bright sunlight the faces can fade. After dark, they glow clearly against the sky.

The architecture firm Krueck and Sexton, based here in Chicago, worked with Plensa to turn the design into a working structure. That was not a small task. Glass, water, electronics, and a Chicago winter do not naturally get along. The towers had to hold screens, lighting, and plumbing, and still survive freezing temperatures and lake winds. What looks effortless is, in fact, a careful piece of engineering hidden in plain sight.

Look down at your feet. The pool between the towers is made of dark granite, and the water on it is only a thin layer, shallow enough for small children to walk through. That was a deliberate choice. Crown Fountain is not something you only look at. It is something you step into. On summer afternoons you will see toddlers in swimsuits, office workers with their shoes in their hands, and tourists rolling up their trousers.

The name comes from the Crown family, a well-known Chicago family of business leaders and philanthropists, who helped fund the fountain. Millennium Park as a whole was built with a mix of public money and private gifts. You will see family and company names attached to many of the works around you. This fountain carries the Crown name, but its real subject is everyone else.

It is worth remembering what this land was before. For much of the twentieth century, this part of the lakefront held railway tracks and parking lots. Millennium Park was built over them, partly on top of a large garage and rail structures. So when you stand on this granite, you are standing on a kind of roof. The park turned a working railway corridor into a public living room for the city.

Notice how people behave here. Strangers stand shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the next jet of water. Children run back and forth between the towers, trying to guess which face will spit next. Parents call out warnings that nobody hears. In a big city where many people pass each other without a word, this is one of the places where they share a small, silly moment together.

The water usually runs during the warmer months, and the fountain becomes much quieter in winter. Even then, the towers and the dark pool keep their shape against the skyline. In every season, the setting matters. Behind you rise the towers of Michigan Avenue. A short walk away is Cloud Gate, the large mirrored sculpture that many people call the Bean. Together they make this corner of the park feel like an open-air gallery.

Before you leave, choose one face and give it your full attention. Watch the eyes blink. Watch the small changes in expression, the slight tilt of the head. Then turn and look at the people around you, the real faces in the crowd, wet hair, bright clothes, phones raised. The towers show you the city, and the pool shows you the city again. Listen once more to the water, and take that sound with you as you walk on.