Posted by sabine7
Digital | Sep 13, 2005
The Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park is hardly a conventional fountain, designed by Catalan sculptor Jaume Plensa. Plensa's fountain uses current technology, but also represents a timelessness in order to truly serve the people of Chicago. Plensa uses video to project images of about one thousand Chicagoans on two fifty-foot-high glass-brick towers that face each other across a plaza that has a one-eighth-inch layer of water. In addition to sporting coloured lights and high-definition images, the towers have water cascading down their sides or flowing out from the mouths of the digital faces.
Artist: Jaume Plensa
+ suntimes.com
The technologies used for Crown Fountain are contemporary, but the idea is one steeped in the tradition of the public square. Plensa kept the plaza empty, so that the water, upon which he intended people to tread, can act as a magnet for human interaction. The people of Chicago and its visitors are an integral part of this very public work of art.
