Two towers of glass block, fifty feet tall, facing each other across a long black granite floor with a quarter inch of water lying on it. And on the inward face of each tower, a person. Enormous. Blinking. Looking at you.
This is Crown Fountain, made by a Catalan sculptor named Zhow-meh Plen-sa, and the faces on it are a thousand actual residents of this city.
Not donors. Not aldermen. Not anybody's idea of an important Chicagoan. The School of the Art Institute went out and found ordinary people — calling community centers, parish groups, choirs, senior clubs, neighborhood associations across the city and asking for volunteers. Then they filmed them one at a time, over about a year. Each person sat roughly a minute in front of a camera, told to hold still and then, at the end, to purse their lips. A minute is a long time to hold still while a stranger films your face, and you can see it in them — people up there visibly resisting the urge to blink, or to laugh, or to ask how much lo
nger this is going to take.
Because eventually the face on the tower puckers, and a jet of water shoots straight out of its mouth.
That's the joke, and it's an old one. Plensa was thinking about gargoyles. Medieval cathedrals ran their rainwater out through carved stone monsters, so for centuries the water that came off a holy building came out of the mouth of a demon. He kept the mechanism and
