(previously: Gehry/New Prize/Millenium Park news)
Andrew Stern in Chicago
Monday July 5, 2004
The Guardian


Chicago hopes to stage an architectural renaissance with a $475m (£260m) park featuring a swirling steel music pavilion designed by Frank Gehry.

Millennium Park, a 25-acre central park built on unsightly railway tracks near Lake Michigan, opens later this month with the outdoor concert venue by Gehry as its centrepiece.

"Millennium Park is a defining element for the city. It's got so much great public art," said park planner Edward Uhlir. "Chicago took its time and created something that's going to be an asset for a very long time."

A $750,000 three-day opening gala featuring concerts, fireworks, a three-ring circus and a dawn tai chi workout is scheduled to begin on July 16.

America's third-largest city secured architectural fame as the 19th-century birthplace of the steel-framed skyscraper and later nurtured the low-slung Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright and the graceful modernism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

But Chicago's reputation for innovative architecture has languished in recent decades, its silhouette blighted by undistinguished glass and steel office buildings, monolithic concrete condominium towers and ubiquitous three-storey brick apartments.

Conceived in 1997 and intended as part of the city's celebration of the new century, Millennium Park was aimed at recapturing the spirit of innovative design that had brought Chicago architectural glory.

The main stage is framed by Gehry's signature curved steel ribbons, and sound is projected overhead via a domed trellis larger than two football fields, creating concert hall-style intimacy for 11,000 listeners.

Gehry, architect of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles, also designed his first bridge for the park, a sinuous walkway over a busy street linked to other parkland.

A fountain by the Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa with a black granite base and glass-brick towers features video images of Chicagoans projected on to the glass. A 20-metre (66ft) polished steel sculpture many liken to a kidney bean was created by the London artist Anish Kapoor.

Landscaped gardens, an underground theatre, an ice rink and twin solar-powered pavilions are among the attractions.

In its original conception, the park, paid for with both public and private money, was projected to cost $150m and due to be completed four years ago. Those targets fell by the wayside as the scope of the project grew and more land was added.

Not everyone is pleased with the result, of course.

Architect and noted curmudgeon Stanley Tigerman said he admired the park, though it had a "theme park" atmosphere and lacked sufficient trees.

Erma Tranter, head of a park watchdog group, said Chicago needed to set aside more green space as it ranks last among large US cities in the amount of parkland per resident. Other critics say the money would have been better spent on relieving poverty and on infrastructure.

"We'd like to see more transit stations, repairs to major thoroughfares, more money put into public libraries, more money in public schools. But [Mayor Richard] Daley tends to focus on these monumental high-profile projects that he sees as making Chicago a world-class city and are really designed to feed his legacy," said advocate Jacqueline Leavy.

But Mr Daley, rumoured to be moving into a condominium overlooking the park, is accustomed to getting his way and has made a mission of draping the city's asphalt in greenery.

In addition to the park, the effort to reinvigorate Chicago's reputation for design has been strengthened by daring new buildings that have sprouted up, many on university campuses, in recent years.

Buildings by an international line-up of "starchitects" - Rem Koolhaas, Helmut Jahn and Ralph Johnson - drew raves.

"Architecture is meant to be there for more than a minute and a half. There's a lot of great stuff coming up in the city," said Mr Tigerman. "Where would you rather be an architect?"