I am thrilled by the way that the city has embraced the Crown Fountain… Every time I visit Chicago, I can see how much my original idea to create a gathering place, continues its purpose to bring people in to share the dreams of a community.
-Jaume Plensa, 2024
Photo: Steve Hall - Hedrich Blessing
This summer the Jaume Plensa-designed Crown Fountain celebrates the twentieth anniversary since its unveiling in late July 2004.
Standing at the center of Millenium Park in Chicago, the installation consists of two fifty-foot tall glass block towers facing each other, with spouts of cascading water falling into a shallow reflecting pool between the structures. The two glass monoliths house monumental screens playing mesmerizing video portraits of one thousand Chicago residents, with their slowly shifting expressions reflected in the shallow water between, which itself has become a beloved public space over the past two decades.
An early study drawing by Plensa for the Crown Fountain.
Stills from the video portraits featured in the Crown Fountain.
Jaume Plensa’s original design for the fountain was realized in a feat of unprecedented technical and creative collaboration between the artist and a team of architects, engineers, glass fabricators, videographers, and lighting specialists.
To reimagine an ancient form, Plensa shifted from the traditional fountain’s often-divine archetype to instead draw in individual citizens of Chicago's community. Working with the help of the School of the Art Institute, the artist filmed one thousand video portraits of Chicagoans from across the city and compiled the two-channel film that is presented on large-scale LED screens set within the glass block construction. In order to align the mouths of each sitter with the waterspouts, Plensa worked digitally to elongate their faces, a process that deeply impacted his practice of portraiture at large in the way that he works to evoke a sense of the soul from the body.
Jaume Plensa at the site of the Crown Fountain during its construction, 2002.
Technology is just a tool, a means to bring ideas out.
-Jaume Plensa
Photo: Laura Medina.
Crown Fountain was born as a patron’s challenge and an artist dreaming “what could a fountain be?” In his first days considering this question, Jaume Plensa focused on water... After also considering what artists who came before him had done across time, he settled on a few principles; his fountain should allow us to realize the widely shared dream of walking on water, his fountain should allow water to do as it does in nature—fall, his fountain should invite people into its beating heart, his fountain should depict not gargoyles or idealistic maidens, but real people, and his fountain should use media of our time.
-Paul Gray, interviewed by the Chicago Tribune, 2024
Photo: Hedrich Blessing.
"The faces are homage to the anonymous people who built up the city."
- Jaume Plensa
The two glass towers, mirrored in their placement across the plaza from each other, preside over what becomes a reflective stage upon which thousands of people interact. The fabric of community is encapsulated in the rotating mosaic of faces by reflecting the city’s inhabitants.
Performance at the Crown Fountain.
To represent the great mosaic of people of Chicago was for me an obsessive idea behind the project. I call it the soul.
-Jaume Plensa
Photo: Kenneth Tanaka
As the screens prevail in constant dialogue throughout the seasons and the water features retire for the winter, the towers progress into a meditative cadence beyond the standard conventions of public fountains.
Time is the substance of my work.
-Jaume Plensa
Jaume Plensa, Crown Fountain.
Jaume Plensa. Photo: Brian Kelly
Over the past thirty-five years, internationally celebrated Spanish artist Jaume Plensa (b. 1955) has produced a multifaceted body of work creating sculpture that speaks to the capacity and beauty of humanity. Conventional sculptural materials like glass, steel, and bronze blend with unconventional media such as water, light, and sound to create hybrid works of intricate energy, psychological weight, and symbolic richness.
In addition to his international museum and gallery exhibitions, Plensa has celebrated public projects on view around the world. Installations of his monumental sculptures include We at the Shard in London; Laura in Los Angeles; Behind the Walls at Rockefeller Center, New York and in the historic courtyard of Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City; Julia in Plaza de Colón in Madrid; Dreaming in Toronto; and most recently, Water’s Soul on the Hudson River.
Plensa has received many national and international awards including the Honorary Doctorate from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2018 and the 2013 Velazquez Prize awarded by the Spanish Cultural Ministry. His solo museum exhibitions include Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, England; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; MAMC–Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Saint-Étienne Métropole, Saint-Étienne, France; and Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR, Brühl, Germany. He lives and works in Barcelona. Explore more about the artist here.
Photo: Hedrich Blessing.