Crown Fountain is an interactive work of public art and video sculpture featured in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Designed by 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.
About Crown Fountain in brief
Crown Fountain is an interactive work of public art and video sculpture featured in Chicago’s Millennium Park. 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 50 feet tall, and they use light-emitting diodes to display digital videos on their inward faces. The installation is a video sculpture, commissioned to operate thirty years. The water operates from May to October, intermittently cascading down the two towers and spouting through a nozzle on each tower’s front face. It is a public play area and offers people an escape from summer heat, allowing children to frolic in the fountain’s water. Residents and critics have praised the fountain for its artistic and entertainment features. 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. As of 2007, Millennium Park trails only Navy Pier as a Chicago tourist attraction. The Fountain is centrally located in Chicago: it is east of Michigan Avenue and its Historic Michigan Boulevard District, north of Monroe Street and the Art Institute of Chicago; and south of Madison Street.
Looking north from the Fountain, viewers see some of the tallest buildings in the United States. Since the fountain is a focus of Chicago, especially Chicago, and Millennium Park, is so greatly affected by the waterfront. Since 2000, the water is the focus of the fountain and the park’s waterfront, especially since Chicago, since Millennium Park and Raoul Wallenberg Square, has become a popular tourist destination. Since 2010, Chicago has been the site of the World Trade Center Museum, which opened in 2011. The museum is a major tourist attraction and is a focal point for the city’s international visitors and visitors to the Chicago area. It was designed by Maya Lin, who presented a low-height horizontal form, and Robert Venturi, whoPresented a fountain that would have been 150 feet tall. The other finalists were Maya Lin and Robert venturi. 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. In January 2000, Plens a won the commission to design the fountain over Lin and Venturi. Some of his early ideas for the project referenced Buckingham Fountain, but these were soon abandoned. His objective was to create a socially relevant, interactive fountain for the 21st century. PlensA sought to create an eternal complement to the natural inspirations of the local waterfront. His presentation included computer animation of facial expressions. In the 1990s, he completed several outdoor sculptures in which the visible subjects of the art are inside and hollow spaces.
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This page is based on the article Crown Fountain published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
