Crown Fountain
Crown Fountain is an interactive work of public art and video sculpture featured in Chicago's Millennium Park, which is located in the Loop community area. Designed by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa and executed by Krueck and Sexton Architects, it opened in July 2004. The fountain is composed of a black granite reflecting pool placed between a pair of glass brick towers. The towers are tall, and they use light-emitting diodes to display digital videos on their inward faces. Construction and design of the Crown Fountain cost $17 million. The water operates from May to October, intermittently cascading down the two towers and spouting through a nozzle on each tower's front face.
Residents and critics have praised the fountain for its artistic and entertainment features. It highlights Plensa's themes of dualism, light, and water, extending the use of video technology from his prior works. Its use of water is unique among Chicago's many fountains, in that it promotes physical interaction between the public and the water. Both the fountain and Millennium Park are highly accessible because of their universal design.
Crown Fountain has been one of the most controversial of all the Millennium Park features. Before it was even built, some were concerned that the sculpture's height violated the aesthetic tradition of the park. After construction, surveillance cameras were installed atop the fountain, which led to a public outcry.
However, the fountain has survived its contentious beginnings to find its way into Chicago pop culture. It is a popular subject for photographers and a common gathering place. While some of the videos displayed are of scenery, most attention has focused on its video clips of local residents. The fountain is a public play area and offers people an escape from summer heat, allowing children to frolic in the fountain's water.
Concept and design
, which is between Lake Michigan and the central business district, is commonly called "Chicago's Front Yard". Its northwest corner had been Illinois Central rail yards and parking lots until 1997, when it was made available for development by the city as Millennium Park. Millennium Park was conceived in 1998 as the capstone of Grant Park, to celebrate the new millennium and to feature world-renowned architects, artists, designers, landscape architects, and urban planners. As of 2007, Millennium Park trails only Navy Pier as a Chicago tourist attraction.Selection of artist
In December 1999, Lester Crown and his family agreed to sponsor a water feature in Millennium Park. Unlike other park feature sponsors, the Crowns acted independently of Millennium Park officials; they conducted independent surveys of water technologies, held their own informal design contest, and stayed active in the design and engineering of the project.The Crowns were open-minded about the choice of artist; wanting a modern work, they solicited proposals from a list of prospective artists and architects. Jaume Plensa researched the traditions and history of fountains and studied anthropomorphism in fountain imagery. Some of his early ideas for the project referenced Buckingham Fountain, but these were soon abandoned. His presentation to the Crown family started with a slide show of fountains from the Middle Ages through the 20th century. Plensa focused on the philosophical meanings associated with fountains, their history, use and art. His presentation included computer animation of facial expressions. The other finalists were Maya Lin, who presented a low-height horizontal form, and Robert Venturi, who presented a fountain that would have been tall. In January 2000, Plensa won the commission to design the fountain over Lin and Venturi. The installation is a video sculpture, commissioned to operate thirty years.
Artistic design
Prior to Crown Fountain, Plensa's dominant theme had been dualism, which he had expanded to artworks in which the viewers are outside, and the visible subjects of the art are inside containers and hollow spaces. In the 1990s, he completed several outdoor sculptures in which he explored the use of light at Stockholm's Raoul Wallenberg Square, Bridge of Light, and LED technology, video, and computer design. In his public art, Plensa challenged himself to involve the viewer with his art, which led to his conception of the Crown Fountain. His objective was to create a socially relevant, interactive fountain for the 21st century. Since water is the focus of a fountain, and since Chicago, and especially Millennium Park, is so greatly affected by the nearby waterfront, Plensa sought to create an eternal water work to complement the local natural inspirations. Because of the colder winters common to the climate of Chicago, Plensa created a fountain that would remain vibrant when the water was inactive in the wintertime, so the fountain is an experience of light themes and the use of video technology.Plensa explores dualism with Crown Fountain, where he has two randomly selected faces "conversing" with each other. Plensa feels that by using faces, he can represent the diversity of the city both in ethnicity and in age. The artist intends to portray the sociocultural evolution of the city by updating the collection of images. His representation has become a part of the city's pop culture; the first few episodes of the first season of Prison Break featured shots of the fountain.
Plensa feels that the challenge in the creation of successful work of public art is to integrate the viewer into an interactive relationship with the art. The fountain is known for encouraging its visitors to splash and slide in the reflecting pool, jostle for position under the water spout and place themselves under the cascade. This interactivity was to some degree accidental. Although the city planned for some interactivity, the transformation of the fountain into a water park for kids within hours of opening surprised Plensa. Now, when the National Weather Service issues summer heat advisories and the Governor of Illinois declares state office buildings as official daytime cooling centers, the national press points to Crown Fountain as a respite for inhabitants of the Chicago metropolitan area.
Video production
Approximately 75 ethnic, social, and religious Chicago organizations were asked to provide candidates whose faces would be photographed for integration into the fountain. The subjects were chosen from local schools, churches and community groups, and filming began in 2001 at the downtown campus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The SAIC students filmed their subjects with a $100,000 high-definition HDW-F900 video camera, the same model used in the production of the three Star Wars prequels. About 20 SAIC students took part in what became an informal master's course in public art for the project. Faculty from Columbia College Chicago was also involved in the production of the video. The high-definition equipment was used because of the scale of the project. Because the image proportions were like a movie screen with a width far exceeding its height, the camera was turned on its side during filming.Each face appears on the sculpture for a total of 5 minutes using various parts of individual 80-second videos. A 40-second section is played at one-third speed forward and backward, running for a total of 4 minutes. Then, there is a subsequent segment, where the mouth is puckering, that is stretched to 15 seconds. This is followed by a section, in which the water appears to spout from the open mouth, that is stretched to last for 30 seconds. Finally, there is a smile after the completion of the water spouting from the mouth, that is slowed to extend for 15 seconds. Of the original 1,051 subjects filmed, 960 videos were determined to be usable for the project. Originally, the set of images was presumed to be the beginning of a work in progress, but as of 2009 no additional videos are planned.
To achieve the effect in which water appears to be flowing from subjects' mouths, each video has a segment where the subject's lips are puckered, which is then timed to correspond to the spouting water, reminiscent of gargoyle fountains. Each face is cropped so that no hair and usually no ears are visible. Since there is no tripod designed for cameras turned on their sides, an adjustable barber/dentist's chair was used to minimize the need for the movement of the state-of-the-art camera during filming. Nonetheless, in some case, digital manipulation was necessary to properly simulate puckering in the exact proper location on the video. Many of the faces had to be stretched in order to get the mouths properly positioned. Additionally, each video was color-corrected for brightness, contrast and color saturation. Both the playback equipment and the final videos had to be further adjusted to account for sunlight during viewing.
Construction and engineering
The Crown family, for whom the fountain is named, donated $10 million of the $17 million construction and design cost. The Goodman family, known for funding the Goodman Theatre, was also a large contributor; the entire $17 million cost was provided by private donations. The initial proposed cost for the fountain had been $15 million.After two architectural firms refused the contract to make Plensa's design a reality, the firm Krueck + Sexton Architects accepted. Public art was a departure from Krueck & Sexton's residential and corporate office-dominated portfolio, which includes buildings like the Spertus Institute. Collaboration between the artist, architectural team, and consultants proved to be crucial to the success of the project. The fountain's black granite reflecting pool measures and has an approximate water depth of. It displays videos on two LED screens, each encapsulated in a glass brick tower measuring.