You're looking at two 50-foot towers with giant faces on them. The faces are going to spit water at you. This is public art.
Crown Fountain opened in 2004. It was designed by a Spanish artist named Jaume Plensa, and it cost $17 million. The faces you see are real Chicagoans — 1,000 of them, filmed one by one, sitting in a barber chair at the School of the Art Institute. They smile. They stare. Then they pucker their lips, and water shoots out of the screen like they're spitting on you.
Children love it. Adults pretend they're just watching the children.
Plensa was inspired by gargoyles — those stone faces on old European buildings with water pouring out of their mouths. He wanted to make a modern version. So instead of stone monsters, he used regular people from Chicago.
One of the original faces belonged to a man named Homer Bryant, who runs a dance school that taught Michelle Obama's daughters. He's been spitting on tourists for 20 years now.
— From the tour: The Postcard Tour
