This futuristic sculpture in Millennium Park has become an icon of Chicago.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
Cloud Gate, aka “The Bean”
In 1997, the city of Chicago was making plans for a patch of land near Grant Park on the shore of Lake Michigan that had previously been a parking lot and a railroad yard. At first, there was talk of building a large parking garage to serve the downtown area, but it was soon decided instead to create a new destination park for both residents and tourists. The project was known as “Lakefront Millennium Park”, which later became just “Millennium Park”. The landscape design was done by local architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.
The centerpiece of Millennium Park was to be an orchestral band shell for outdoor concerts that was designed by Frank Owen Gehry, the prize-winning creator of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain, who one local newspaper referred to as “the hottest architect in the universe”. The park would also include fountains, an ice skating rink, a garden, and public sculptures and artworks. Construction began in September 1998. It was originally planned for 16 acres, but it ended up at 24.
When Millennium Park opened in July 2004, however, after a series of delays, it was not the $35 million Pritzker Pavilion that caught all the attention. The press and the public both focused on the sculpture—a gleaming rounded stainless-steel work that was titled “Cloud Gate”, but was immediately dubbed “The Bean”.
Back when the park was being planned, the city had appointed a committee from the local art community to select some prominent artists to approach. They began with a list of around 50 before narrowing it down to two who were asked for submissions—American Jeff Koons and British Anish Kapoor.
Koons submitted a proposal for “The Slide”, envisioned as a 90-foot tall steel and glass ramp that would allow visitors to climb (or take an elevator) to the top to gain a panoramic view of the park and the city, then slide back down to the ground—in effect a giant sliding board. This idea was eventually dropped as being too large and too complex.
Kapoor’s plan envisioned a semi-spherical mirrored object with a flowing form reminiscent of liquid mercury, that would reflect the city and its visitors. The idea was based on a museum piece he had done in 1995 called “Turning the World Inside Out”, which consisted of a mirrored six-foot sphere with a turned-in “navel” reaching into the interior. The “Cloud Gate” would be 66 feet long and, although it would look fluid and weightless, it would contain about 100 tons of steel. “What I wanted to do in Millennium Park,” Kapoor later explained, “is make something that would engage the Chicago skyline, so that one will see the clouds kind of floating in, with those very tall buildings reflected in the work. And then, since it is in the form of a gate, the participant, the viewer, will be able to enter into this very deep chamber that does, in a way, the same thing to one's reflection as the exterior of the piece is doing to the reflection of the city around.”
This proposal was accepted and $6 million was budgeted for it (the total cost would eventually come in at $23 million, all of it from private donations). Originally planned to be located in the Lurie Gardens area of the park, it was moved to another section of its own for fear that as people approached the sculpture to look at their reflections they would trample all the flower beds.
Construction of Cloud Gate began in 2003. Working from a wooden scale model and using computer-guided equipment, the stainless steel plates were fashioned in Oakland CA by a company that normally made boat hulls. Each of the 168 pieces was then trucked to Chicago, seamlessly welded into place and carefully polished to a mirrored sheen, forming one continuous curved surface. All of the construction work was hidden by curtains.
To Kapoor’s disappointment, the polishing work had not yet been finished by the time Millennium Park officially opened in July 2004, and some of the seams were still visible when Cloud Gate was unveiled during the ceremony. But even in that state it was visually stunning, and it stole the show from the other attractions. So many people were constantly crowding around it that Kapoor was not able to begin the final polishing until six months later when winter whittled down the number of visitors. The sculpture was finally completed in October 2005.
The entire structure of Cloud Gate is hollow and has no internal supports. The steel plates were specially coated to resist rain and fingerprints, but the lower portion of the sculpture must still be wiped down twice every day to keep it clean, and twice each year the entire work is scrubbed down with detergent.
Today the Bean has become the second most-visited place in Chicago, exceeded only by Navy Pier.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)