The Lyric Opera Building in Chicago (as seen from the river side). Home of the Joffrey ballet. The spitting water bit is an homage to the Crown Fountains - a sort of water park near Lake Shore Drive & Lake Michigan.
It’s a little hard to tell from this angle, but the building was designed to look like a giant throne.
Initially I had thought to render the building as-is with it’s weather-worn limestone facade. In fact, you can see some of that detail work along the very bottom portion of the drawing. It was going to be a laborious process and then I thought why not make it a bit more interesting and abstract with the opera scenes.
I got to see the inside for the very first time back in December '23. My wife and I went to see their yearly Nutcracker ballet . Fantastic.
Exactly. they do that in NYC quite often - both inside and outside presentations. We saw this fantastic Picasso exhibit called Imagine Picasso - an immersive video presentation at a large inside venue in Manhattan. In fact, the Nutcracker ballet we saw used projected images on the walls of the stage area. It was an amazing way to add wonder and awe to the presentation. Here’s a better photo of the building
And here’s a photo of the Crown Fountain display in downtown Chicago. There are two of these large monoliths that feature live facial displays, Every so often the face will appear to be spitting water and then a stream of water sprays out from the mouth area. You’ll see kids splashing around in the water in the summer.
