Today's Bing homepage features no mountains or seas, but an entire canopy of shimmering light overhead — and beneath it, a story that rose from the ashes.
Image: Bing Daily Wallpaper · Tiffany Dome, Chicago Cultural Center, Illinois, USA (© Felix Lipov/Shutterstock) · Official image (Ultra HD)
Open Bing today and there's no landscape — just a ceiling set ablaze by glass: tens of thousands of small pieces assembled into concentric rings of pattern, blue and gold flowing gently among them. The Bing homepages for China, Japan, Germany, and the UK all look up at the same dome today.
This is Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. Suspended above the hall is the world's largest Tiffany stained-glass dome: roughly 38 feet in diameter, composed of approximately 30,000 handmade pieces of "Favrile" glass, each cut into the shape of a fish scale. According to Bing, when light passes through this translucent dome, blue and gold shimmer and shift across the patterns. The twelve signs of the zodiac are set into the crown of the dome, while a band of mosaic around the base bears a quotation from the English essayist Joseph Addison, to the effect that books are the legacies that genius leaves to mankind.
A Great Fire and Eight Thousand Donated Books
That inscription is no accident — when this building opened in 1897, it served as Chicago's first central public library. And this library rose from the ashes. In October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire consumed 18,000 structures; the Chicago Tribune estimated at the time that some two to three million books across the city were reduced to cinders. In the fire's aftermath, a Londoner named Thomas Hughes launched a newspaper appeal for an "English Book Donation," proposing that Britain should gift the burned city a free public library. Eight thousand volumes soon crossed the Atlantic, many bearing the donors' own signatures on their flyleaves: Queen Victoria, Darwin, Tennyson, Browning…
A Library in a Water Tank, a Dome in a Palace
On New Year's Day 1873, the Chicago Public Library officially opened. Its first reading room was a circular iron water tank that had survived the fire — patrons had to climb an external staircase to get in, sweltering in summer and freezing in winter. Over the next two decades the collection moved from place to place, until October 11, 1897, when a new building on Michigan Avenue — constructed at a cost of roughly two million dollars — opened its doors to the public. Burned once, the designers made the new structure "nearly fireproof." The Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company created the dome and light fixtures for the main lending hall, with the work overseen by its chief mosaicist, J. A. Holzer. A library that once sheltered inside a water tank finally had its own crown, and Chicagoans took to calling the entire building "the People's Palace."
Light Sealed Away for Seventy Years
Even a crown can have its dim years. In 1935, the dome was covered over with a shell of concrete and copper, shutting out natural light for more than seventy years. In 1991, the library moved into the newly built Harold Washington Library Center, and the old building was converted into the Chicago Cultural Center, free and open to all. In 2008, restoration was completed: every glass panel was individually removed, repaired, and reinstalled, and the hall reopened on July 1 of that year. According to the City of Chicago, the crowds that came to gaze up at the dome that summer set a new record.
Today's wallpaper doesn't mark any particular anniversary — it reads more like a midsummer reminder. The UK edition's caption puts it plainly: "Chicago, look up!" Next time you walk into a grand old building that charges no admission, try tilting your head back: some cities save their most precious treasures for those willing to look up.
Sources: City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (chicago.gov), Chicago Public Library history (chipublib.org), Bing / Peapix, Culture Trip