Crown Fountain

Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain, installed in Millennium Park in 2004, is two fifty-foot glass-block towers that play enormous video portraits of the faces of ordinary Chicagoans. Periodically water spouts from the mouths of the projected faces onto the black granite plaza below, where in summer children stand under it. It turned a fountain into a portrait of the city's own people.

Photographed June 2024. The fountain is built from light and faces, so black and white treats it as form — the towers rising over the reflecting plaza, the architecture of a thing that is really a piece of moving art.