Cloud Gate

Interesting facts

Kapoor's contract states that the sculpture should be expected to last for 1,000 years.

The rival proposal in the 1999 competition came from Jeff Koons: a 46-metre playground slide with an observation deck reached by elevator.

The first plan was to assemble the whole sculpture in Oakland and ship it through the Panama Canal and the St Lawrence Seaway, until park officials judged that too risky.

Each of the 168 plates is about 10 mm thick and weighs roughly 450 to 900 kg, and they were cut so precisely that none needed trimming on site.

Welding the plates together created about 744 metres of seams, each ground and polished in five stages until it disappeared.

The lowest 1.8 metres of steel are wiped by hand twice a day, and the whole surface is washed twice a year with about 150 litres of detergent.

The deepest point of the omphalos, the dimpled chamber underneath, is about 8.2 metres above the ground.

Kapoor's piece was first meant for the Lurie Garden in the park's southeast corner, but officials moved it to its plaza over the artist's objections.

A strikingly similar steel sculpture, said to represent an oil bubble, appeared in Karamay, China, in 2015, and Kapoor called it a knockoff.

The sculpture appears in the closing scene of the film Source Code, whose director saw it as a metaphor for the story.

Why it is worth it

Cloud Gate is Anish Kapoor's giant polished-steel bean in Millennium Park, and the first thing to know is that the nickname stuck despite the artist: he called "The Bean" completely stupid before eventually making his peace with it. The sculpture is about 10 metres high, 20 metres long and 13 metres wide, weighs around 100 tonnes, and is made of 168 stainless-steel plates welded and polished until no seam shows. Kapoor took the idea from liquid mercury, and the surface behaves like it — the skyline along Randolph Street, the clouds and the crowd all slide and bend across it.

Walk underneath. The arch is about 3.7 metres high, and at its centre is the "omphalos", a concave dome that multiplies and warps your reflection into a kaleidoscope. From a little distance, three-quarters of the surface is sky, which is where the official name comes from. Fabrication was a small epic: engineers doubted a seamless shell could be done at all, the plates were shaped with computer modelling and robots, trucked from California and welded on site, and the finished piece ended up almost twice the originally estimated weight, so the garage and restaurant roof beneath it had to be reinforced. It was shown half-finished at the park's opening in 2004 and formally dedicated on 15 May 2006.

Cloud Gate sits on Grainger Plaza, between the Chase Promenade and the McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink, and it makes a good starting point for the rest of Millennium Park: the Crown Fountain, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion and the Lurie Garden are all a short walk away. The park itself is effectively a roof garden laid over rail tracks and car parks at the northwest corner of Grant Park.

Getting there

Millennium Park is bounded by Michigan Avenue, Randolph Street, Columbus Drive and East Monroe Drive in the Loop, Chicago's downtown; Millennium Station, the Metra commuter terminal, lies directly beneath it. The nearest airport is Chicago Midway (MDW), about 15 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Cloud Gate is a public sculpture by artist Anish Kapoor that is the centerpiece of Grainger Plaza at Millennium Park in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois, United States. Constructed between 2004 and 2006, the sculpture is nicknamed "The Bean" because of its shape. Made up of 168 stainless steel plates welded together, its reflective and highly polished exterior has no visible seams. It measures 33 by 66 by 42 feet, and weighs 110 short tons. The sculpture and its plaza are located above Millennium Hall, between the Chase Promenade and McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Cloud Gate

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

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From the encyclopaedia