The Bean

The Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, or the bean as I have come to call it, is a very unique piece of design. The materials used for the surface were highly polished stainless steel plates, and if you have ever seen it up close you can see that there are no seams for where the plates meet. From this it is easy to determine that the designer obviously wanted his design to reflect something. Looking at it you can see that it reflects the city’s skyline along with the clouds above. And of course if you walk up to it you can see your own reflection. Because of the shape, however, the reflections are somewhat distorted, but still beautiful. Possibly the artist wanted to bring this to people’s attention, or he just wanted to give people a new way to see the city skyline (a new perspective). Either way it seems to grab people’s attention none the less.

One thing about the work is that the shape is a little humorous in my opinion. At first glance it looks like a giant bean, and that is all I see. After really looking at it I realize that the shape is to help stretch and distort images it reflects. However, in my opinion the bean shape kind of takes away from the original idea the artist may have had for the work, and it is very hard for me to look past its shape and see the beauty it reflects back at us. This makes me wonder whether there are a lot of designs like this, meaning designs that may lose their artistic value because they are compared to other objects (in this case a bean). Although the artist probably had no intention of designing a bean, this shows that outside viewers a lot of times view a work of art in a completely different way than the original intention.

~ by jdoughn2 on December 2, 2008.