Cloud Gate, The Bean

The silver sculpture ahead is made of one hundred sixty eight separate steel plates, welded together and then polished by hand until every one of the two thousand four hundred forty two feet of seams between them simply disappeared. British Indian artist Anish Kapoor designed it to mirror the skyline and the clouds above it so completely that from certain angles it seems to vanish into the sky itself, which is exactly the point of its real name, Cloud Gate, though almost nobody in Chicago calls it that. Underneath, the surface curves inward into a concave chamber visitors can walk beneath, where their own reflection multiplies and warps back at them along with the skyline above.

It was supposed to cost six million dollars. By the time it was finished it had cost twenty three million, nearly four times the original budget, largely because polishing a curved stainless steel surface to a seamless mirror finish at that size had never really been attempted anywhere before, and engineers had to invent new welding and buffing techniques as they went. Chicagoans started calling it the Bean almost as soon as construction began, for its obvious shape, and Kapoor reportedly hated the nickname at first, calling it completely stupid in interviews during construction, insisting the piece deserved to be seen as something more than a vegetable. He came around eventually. Years later, asked what he called his own sculpture, he simply said he called it the Bean too, and stopped fighting a name the whole city had already chosen for him.