Documented artwork / monumental reflective sculpture
Cloud Gate
Credit as documented: Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate uses a polished stainless-steel shell to reflect Chicago’s skyline and the sky above Millennium Park. Its apparently continuous surface required a closely coordinated fabrication process. Performance Structures Inc. formed, trimmed and polished 168 plates in Oakland before they were transported to Chicago, assembled around an internal structure, welded together and finished on site. The fabricator describes a 110-ton shell suspended from two stainless-steel rings and tethered at only one end. This arrangement allows thermal expansion and contraction while protecting the reflected image from distortion. Kapoor’s own project entry dates the work to 2004. The fabricator’s account provides construction evidence for this particular Chicago installation beyond the artist’s brief object caption.
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At a glance
- Year / version
- 2004
- Materials
- stainless steel
- Documented setting
- outdoor
- Dimensions
- 10 × 20 × 12.8 metres
- Dimensions apply to
- Artist-published dimensions for Cloud Gate at Millennium Park; axis order is not labelled and is preserved verbatim.
- Availability
- Unconfirmed
Places & versions
Installation history
Historical presentations. A past installation does not establish the current location or suitability for a new site.
2004 (artist and fabricator project date)
Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Site
- Millennium Park
- City
- Chicago
- State / region
- IL
- Country
- United States
- Setting
- outdoor
Installation details checked 2026-10-17. Supporting source ↗.
Materials and construction
Performance Structures separately reports 66 feet long, 45 feet wide and 33 feet high. Its stated width does not exactly align with the artist’s metric triplet; the discrepancy is retained rather than silently converted or reconciled.
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Sources
- anishkapoor.com ↗ · Checked 2026-10-17
- www.performancestructures.com ↗ · Checked 2026-10-17