Seven Aluminum Owls Guarding the World's Largest Public Library

Seven giant owls perch along the roofline ahead, cast in painted aluminum, each one tucked into a nest of leaves, and they were not put there as decoration alone. When the Harold Washington Library Center opened in October of nineteen ninety one, its architects worried that nearly a million square feet of brick and glass would read as cold and fortress like from the street, so they brought in sculptors Raymond Kaskey and Kent Bloomer to crown the roofline with oversized ornaments: owls at the corners, representing wisdom and watching over the books below, and seed pods along the other sides, meant to evoke the agricultural bounty of the Midwest that built this city's wealth in the first place.

The building itself earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest public library building on Earth, a scale chosen deliberately to replace two overcrowded facilities with a single central library the city could be proud of. It carries the name of Harold Washington, Chicago's first Black mayor, who died suddenly in office in nineteen eighty seven, four years before the building that honors him was finished. The design drew mixed reviews when it opened, criticized by some for its heavy, almost industrial brick exterior, but the owls softened the argument, literally. Climb to the ninth floor winter garden under its own glass roof, and you are standing above a library built not just to hold books, but to announce, with aluminum birds the size of small cars, that Chicago intended this building to last.