Cloud Gate Michigan Avenue Reflection

ADDRESS: 201 East Randolph Street, Chicago, IL (inside Millennium Park)ARCHITECT: Anish KapoorYEARS BUILT: 1999–2006 Chicago has always announced itself through structure. Steel frames. Right angles. Towers rising in disciplined rows from a flat grid beside a flat lake. The city's identity was vertical, rational, and unambiguous. Louis Sullivan built here. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built here. The skyscraper was invented here. Chicago does not whisper. It rises. So when the most iconic object in downtown Chicago turned out to be a seamless, mirrored oval that hides every bolt, every weld, every structural rib inside its skin, that told you something important. Not about the object. About the city. Chicago built a monument to illusion. And it took a dentist's chair to make it happen. Richard M. Daley was sitting in his dentist's chair in the late 1990s when he looked up at the light overhead and decided Chicago needed to think bigger. Below his office window, the northwest corner of Gr