Giant chicago bean

The bean is one of the best ways to capture chicago's beautiful skyline while still being in the photo. People take artsy selfies in front of it. I dare you to not take a selfie at the bean! The sculpture basically looks like a giant mirrored bean. One of the great things about the chicago bean is that you can walk through it. The work is now covered by a white canopy.

Anish kapoor, the artist behind millennium park's iconic cloud gate a. The bean is 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long. The bean at issue — the new bean in houston — arrived in the city's museum district on monday, lowered onto a new plaza near the museum of fine arts, houston with the help of a giant crane.

It is made of over different. Chill sack bean bag chair:. The bean is a work of public art in the heart of chicago. Located just south of the chicago river, the polished stainless steel structure is also known as cloud gate for the way it mirrors the sky and surroundings so clearly. My personal observations and comments: Located just south of the chicago river, the polished stainless steel structure is also known as cloud gate for the way it mirrors the sky and surroundings so clearly.

The bean, the chicago bean, that big shiny thing in millennium park what are people saying? Although chicago's millennium park turns 10 years old this month, the popularity of its iconic mirrored sculpture hasn't dulled with age.

Short video of the big bean in chicago. We like food. We like people. We like feeding people food. We promise not to make people into food. We promise to make simple, delicious slightly cheffy food for people to eat. We promise to be ready with the wine should the people want it. The digital image, then, was sent to potential fabricators to create sample sheets of steel, the components that would eventually be welded together in a seamless finish. After seeking out three potential firms, Kapoor settled on Performance Structures, Inc.

Its team had returned the highest quality sample to win the contract. There, he had had a conversation with a computer engineer who had worked with the artist on a prior project.

The Performance Structures team sent milled foam models and accompanying computer versions to Kapoor, who would return feedback for another round of adjustments. These model plates of hard foam, each about 18 inches in length, served as the design framework for the steel panels that were to comprise the final sculpture.

Initial plans to ship the fully welded sculpture via ship—through the Panama Canal to the northeast U. Lawrence Seaway to Chicago—were scraped due to concerns about such a long journey with the one-of-kind work. Instead, individual plates were sent on trucks to Chicago, where final construction would take place. Edges would be welded together and re-polished to provide a seamless finish. More than a half-dozen workers built the interior rings and trusses—a steel skeleton—that supported the plates during construction and was removed after completion.

The final work, true to its eggshell analogy, had no interior supports. Just try not to leave too many fingerprints and ruin the experience for others. The Bean receives a power wash each day and a deep cleaning twice each year.

During the deep clean, workers use nearly 40 gallons of detergent to bring the metallic surface back to its mirrored state. Construction on Millennium Park began in with the goal to open in time to celebrate the new millennium.

Delays and cost overruns meant the park ended up opening in , nearly four years behind schedule. City planners considered several prominent artists before settling on a proposal by Sir Anish Kapoor for a major artistic installation. Concerns about Kapoor's initial designs further delayed construction. Some feared the highly reflective surface might become dangerously hot in the summer or cold in the winter. Others worried it would be too cumbersome to maintain the necessary polish on a sculpture exposed to the elements.

All of this meant Cloud Gate was unveiled only in In the late s, urban planners in Chicago were looking to revitalize a prime piece of public space located just across Michigan Avenue from the Loop District. Having existed variously as a park, a rail yard, and a parking lot in the many decades that followed, the area was in need of a makeover when city planners decided to build a great urban park to celebrate the coming of the third millennium.

Despite significant construction delays and massive cost overruns, Millennium Park eventually opened to the public in In overcoming these challenges, city planners managed to construct a widely praised public greenspace that would go on to earn a place in many a Chicago resident's heart. Millennium Park lies at the extreme northwest corner of a far larger urban greenspace that comprises Maggie Daley Park , Grant Park , Lakefront Park, and more.

That Millennium Park manages to stand out among the others is a testament to the park's design and planning. Gehry's incorporation of flowing shapes and a trellis structure were meant to invoke a futuristic architecture befitting of a new millennium. Atelier One, a British engineering firm, teamed up with freelance engineer Chris Hornzee to design the internals of the Cloud Gate. The team chose to use a high-density polyurethane foam during construction of the final structure.

Sections were prefabricated and transported to Millennium Park for assembly. Under the mirror polished surface of the Bean are several framing components that keep the overall structure standing.

The interior was designed in such a way as to avoid structural overload at any one point. The frame allows the Bean to expand and contract along with changes in exterior temperature. During design and construction of Cloud Gate , the engineers tasked with bringing Sir Anish Kapoor's vision to fruition faced numerous challenges.

In considering building materials, stainless steel was quickly rejected due to its tendency to absorb heat from the surrounding environment. Heating during the day followed by cooling at night might well have led to cracks or other imperfections appearing on the sculpture's surface and thereby ruining the design.

Ultimately, engineers took inspiration from tried and true methods used in the shipbuilding industry and selected a wooden structure that could expand and contract with changes in temperature. Contrary to some urban legends, there is actually nothing contained inside the Bean aside from the basic structural elements, though at one point there was a rudimentary construction office located inside.