You already know it's a bean. Everybody knows it's a bean. Its name is Cloud Gate, the sculptor is Anish Kapoor, and he has spent roughly twenty years being quietly furious that the city looked at his masterwork and named it after a legume. He called it Cloud Gate because it catches the sky and the skyline and bends them across its surface. Chicago looked at a smooth silver oval and reported what it saw.
Start with the object, because the object is an engineering feat pretending to be a sculpture. It's thirty-three feet tall, sixty-six feet long, a hundred and ten tons, and it's made of a hundred and sixty-eight separate plates of stainless steel — welded together and then ground and polished by hand until every weld disappears. Nobody had produced a seamless mirrored surface at that scale before. Fabricators told the city it wasn't possible. The polishing alone required its own invented process.
Which is why it was late, and why it cost what it cost. The original budget was six mill
ion dollars. The final number was around twenty-three. The whole park ran the same way — Millennium Park was supposed to open in the year two thousand, hence the name, and opened in two thousand four, four years behind schedule and hundreds of millions over.
And when they did unveil it, it wasn't finished. The seams were still visible. Kapoor was not thrilled about that. The plan was to put the t
