Entries associated with the tag "Millennium Park":

2004 Pritzker Prize-winner Zaha Hadid and and Ben van Berkel will be contributing pavilions to Millennium Park next year as part of the Burnham Plan centennial celebration next year. But possibly more exciting:

"Also educators, they and their studios will participate at Chicago architecture schools in workshops and presentations related to the pavilion projects, Hadid at Illinois Institute of Technology and van Berkel at the University of Illinois at Chicago."

Neat choices. The Zaha Hadid Blog is a good intro to her work. She's also a painter, and her work in that field is a little bit along the lines of Yes album covers. Her architecture puts me in the mind of Star Wars come to life, but reasonable people will disagree--for example, other reasonable people think her work looks like something out of Battlestar Galactica. The park, I think, will temper the effect, so hopefully it won't give me the creeps too much.

Here's a tour of van Berkel's Astrohome (sensing a theme?). Five Franklin Place reminds me of Aqua. His Mobius House made a splash awhile back.

"He's gotten away from the soft pornography of the flower," said Charles Waldheim, the director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto. "He's interested in the life cycle, how plant material ages over the course of the year" and how it relates to the plants around it. Like a good marriage, his compositions must work well together as its members age."

A nice profile of Piet Oudolf, the cutting-edge Dutch gardener who did the planting design for Millennium Park. "The soft pornography of the flower" is one of the best constructions I've heard in a long time.

The Museum of Modern Ice is up in Millennium Park. Chicagoist disapproves: "We wanted a serious wall, not the inside of a dying freezer with a bunch of melting popsicles."

Personally, I think MoMI's decadent transience is, well, resonant. 

I like art and stuff, but maybe now's the wrong time to spend public money (specifically, the hotel tax) on more Millennium Park art.

Specifically art that, like life, and love, and political machines, is ultimately fleeting.

Art that is transient.

Art that f***ing melts.

FYI, here's an insider blog on the project that I can't really wrap my head around. 

If you have a problem with Google snapping your picture on the street, you have no legal recourse, but you do have an sartorial one. (Then again, maybe we can get the city of Chicago to go after Google if they deign to shoot Millennium Park.)

Millennium Park's Lurie Garden--as an artistic work--is especially poignant during the controversy over Grant Park's "open, free, and clear" status. Chicago's motto, "Urbs in Horto," is meant to highlight the city's commitment to parkland, but it's basically PR. When the city was given the motto, our metropolis was more of a slaughterhouse in a mud puddle; now it's a TIF in a grid. 

And Millennium Park, for all its attraction and wonder, is an aesthetic expression of the triumph of urbanity. It's no less a simulacrum than Washington Park, Garfield Park, and the city's other sylvan, continental green spaces, but it is hugely different, notably in its lack of green space. It's crazy futuristic (the Bean, the Gehry bandshell) and its most significant humanizing touch, the Crown Fountain, is the glitziest light sculpture between Times Square and Vegas.

In the midst of all this is Lurie Garden. According to the official site, the fenced-in hedge is meant to symbolize Sandburg's "city of big shoulders," but to me it looks like an internment camp for brushy little trees, a symbol of victory over the prairie. It questions the city's motto and the aspirationally Euro aspect of Olmstead's parks, but also suggests the delicacy of the open land we have left in the city and its environs. It's worth thinking about while the Children's Museum comes in for a crash landing.

No one ever mentions Millennium Monument, the neoclassical peristyle that is both a literal throwback (an almost identical one was at the same location for about half the 20th century, part of Burnham's grand plan) and an aesthetic one in the midst of a giant postmodern architectural theme park.

That's because it's boring and ugly. But it's boring and ugly in a very interesting way, my favorite aesthetic object lesson in the city.

Neoclassical architecture is the official architecture of overarching civic power and old-school fuck-you money.* Some of it's actually good (the delicate Wrigley building), some of it's endearingly narcissistic (the Tribune Tower), some of it's kind of dull, like the Millennium Monument. But it all says one thing: We built this city on rock and reputation. Rarely is it quite so stubbornly obvious as the Millennium Monument, which is why I begrudgingly love it.

*Alternately, baby-boomer fuck-you money is more van der Rohevian. 

The Trib reports that Millennium Park will be borrowing a number of works by sculptor Mark di Suvero beginning in April, in lieu of the usual summer exhibit of large-scale photography. Suvero's an abstract expressionist who works mostly in wood and steel, which will be something of a departure from the park's signature shiny sci-fi aesthetic (no, seriously--the Crown Fountain is pretty much the monolith from 2001, except for the kids).

Not that it's inappropriate; the most famous piece of public art in the city is an abstract expressionist work, as is the most infamous for that matter ("Snoopy in a blender"). So if di Suvero's work looks a bit anachronistic in our aluminum wonderland, consider its aesthetic connection to the Picasso sculpture.

I'm most intrigued by Shang (pictured), which looks like something used to torture giants but is actually a swing. One of the great successes of the park is to have high art that appeals to children--who go nuts whenever the Crown Fountain turns on--so sculpture that doubles as playground equipment will work quite nicely.

For someone who works largely in I-beams, di Suvero covers a lot of aesthetic territory, from intimidating to elegant to whimsical; the Storm King Art Center has a great overview of his work.