As millennia go, this one hasn't gone far, so opening a Millennium Park four years late doesn't seem that egregious.
And this summer, the new park was the glory of Chicago. Even the $475 million cost could not dampen enthusiasm for the new playground on the Miracle Mile, just north of the Art Institute of Chicago. It is more playground than park, certainly, a place you visit to experience design events, not to picnic or to read under a tree.
As an open-air gallery, it does not disappoint. On one corner, children play in a shallow pool, awaiting the flume of water that now and then spews from the mouth of a giant face. The pool stretches between a pair of 50-foot-tall, glass-block towers, each projecting a Chicagoan's face, three or four each hour, in Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain. A little further on, gawkers young and old play in the bean-shaped funhouse mirror known as "Cloud Gate," designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor of London.
The Jay Pritzker Pavilion presides over the lot. The archetypal Frank Gehry gesture, a frozen explosion of metal, crowns the new bandshell. Perhaps to define a sense of enclosure while not actually providing it, the bandshell tosses a broadly woven web of metal arches, a speaker trellis you might say, over the huge lawn. It is a spectacular sight, to be sure.
And spectacle is one expectation for the park. Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin observes: "The people visiting Millennium Park no longer want to passively observe painterly scenes of nature, as they did in [landscape architect Frederick Law] Olmsted's day. That was an industrial-age ideal, when the charge was to provide a relief from the crowded, polluted city. This is a post-industrial park, in which people want to actively engage what they see."
But Kamin also warns: "It cannot sustain itself—it will burn itself out—if it is solely about spectacle."
That's a surprising kind of problem for a park, not a source of worry when Chicago announced plans for the 24.5-acre facility lid in 1998. The city turned over the land to a nonprofit organization, Millennium Park Inc., headed by John H. Bryan, the retired chairman of Sara Lee Corp. "The private sector can do what the public can't," Bryan told The Christian Science Monitor. "It can say: 'Do your masterpiece and don't worry about the cost.'"
This breezy and breathless maxim rules in Las Vegas, where billionaires build and buy resorts, a more complex kind of park, and stock them with art and entertainment. In St. Marks Square did Kublai Khan a Guggenheim LV decree. Chicago got a floorplate of sponsored spaces, in which donors installed wonders of their choice. No ponderous committees of interest-groupers poring over requests for proposals, no anguished competitions. Just build it.
This might not have been the great idea most observers make of it, some invoking the largesse of the Medici. Writing in the Monitor, Kelly Kleiman notes that Gehry wanted to do a simple, refined shelter in the tradition of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose Illinois Institute of Technology campus a few miles south is the breath of austerity, relic perhaps of the pre-post-industrial city. "But since the $15 million bandshell was being underwritten by local philanthropist Cindy Pritzker, her preference for a design more readily identifiable as a 'Gehry' won out," writes Kleiman, who learned this from the park's project manager.
In Las Vegas, nothing lasts, and so we care not how any construction will weather time. But Chicago has reason to ponder how its "Gehry" will fare over the decades, if not the centuries. Even Gehry, apparently, isn't doing "Gehry" any more. In another generation, his signature swirls might seem as dated as tailfins, as literal weather takes its toll, too. Will kids still wade in the face pond? Grin in Kapoor's "Cloud?"
It would be nice to think so, that the interactive art park, or interior environment, is a permanent urban fixture, as much diversion and muse as its Olmsted antecedent. But it is in the nature of post-industrial experience that all is meta-fleeting. You can only picture-phone your chrome reflection so many times, after all. The park must morph to maintain. And who knows? Perhaps some future generation decides it would like to escape the infosphere by cracking a book under a tree, in a vest-pocket arcadia.
Alternately, a city could assemble an urban district that is postmodern art park, premodern picnic park and vibrant mixed-use neighborhood. It's a variant on what private-sector Las Vegas does best, but the "private-public" model embraced by Chicago might not be the wisest approach. Results here are, to put it kindly, mixed. A Downtown seems to be coalescing under the city's leadership. But the monorail has not been a shining paradigm in building the public realm.
And the city's 61-acre Downtown project has sputtered. After 15 months haggling with one developer, Las Vegas took over as developer in January 2003. Now it has turned to another developer. The city, though, drew specific plans during the interim that The Related Companies will have to follow in filling the parcel.
This is encouraging, because the public should play the major role in developing public spaces. Those 61 acres could become the heart of a new city, uniquely condensing its life and business and leisure. Or it could become a theme park of corporate architecture, dazzling but hollow, a garden of egos.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.