Crown Fountain Photo

Photographer’s Note

The Crown Fountain is another attraction of the currently opening Millennium Park in Chicago. I already featured the Cloud Gate sculpture in a previous posting.

This fountain, designed by Barcelona-based sculptor Jaume Plensa, consists of a pair of 50-foot glass-brick towers facing each other across a black granite plaza with water cascading down their sides. At regular intervals, the flow of water over the inside face of each tower is interrupted as a giant LED screen behind the glass brick displays the face of one of the 1,000 Chicagoans filmed for the installation. Each face appears for about 15 minutes and periodically the face will purse his/her lips as water pours from a spout creating an illusion that the person is spitting water into the plaza below. The space between the towers is bathed in an eight of an inch of water, deep enough to reflect the images and shallow enough for people to walk across to interact with the fountain or a soak under the cascading water and/or spout.

I took a photo of just one of the towers with children playing under the water.

pamastro, dth, jhm, DiaAzul has marked this note useful

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jhm (85052) 2004-07-18 12:23

A very colourful image, Ken, the children enjoy it water play, the buildings right are clear and lovely sharp.

Burnham (2426) 2004-07-18 14:40

This is a really cool piece of installation, I would like to see that in real life some day. You did very well in capturing it, and the distortion is inevitable. Good work.

snuggleaphagus (4140) 2004-07-18 15:11

Very cool the details of the photo are great with the great Mosaic like face. It has a very surreal feeling to the whole thing. The kids are great too, specially the splashing by the child's foot.
On crazy and bizarre note this reminds me of a spitting contest when I was a kid, we were on a balcony spitting at the passerbys and trying to see who could hit the most people. I got into so much trouble... I still cringe thinking about it. Thanks for bringing back a memory

pamastro (7215) 2004-07-19 0:26

Interesting fountain. I was just reading an article on blurring the edges of art and bringing in digital and sculpture all together. Looks like that's what this is. This is also a nice capture to show the human use of the fountain. It's completely interactive which is something I like with some art, such as a fountain I posted a photo of in Detroit. It becomes more than something to just look at and admire. Great colors and very nicely captured.

Martine (0) 2004-08-17 6:54 [Comment]