Sunday afternoon in the Cyber-Age Park: the city's new greensward features Frank Gehny's latest, plus "interactive" sculptural works by Jaume Plensa and Anish Kapoor

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Franz Schulze

In March 1998, Chicago's mayor, Richard M. Daley, announced plans for a lakefront project consisting of two elements: a new parking garage to be built over the old Illinois Central railroad tracks and, on its roof, a 16 acre park with space for a band shell. The design was entrusted to the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), which produced a plan consonant with the Beaux Arts layout of nearby historic Grant Park.

Today it is hard to keep those intentions in mind, given the extensive changes that have since taken place. The venture has grown, both in area and in ambition, to become Millennium Park, one of the most engaging urban landscapes in the United States. As the 20th century drew to a close, project director Edward Uhlir urged the city to move on a path more innovative than that of the SOM proposal. Eight acres were added to an area that now runs along Michigan Avenue from Randolph Street south to Monroe Street and east to Columbus Drive. Commissions went to a group of internationally recognized creative talents--architects, landscape designers and sculptors--with the individual assignments awarded by public officials and private patrons who demonstrated considerable imagination in their own right.

The decision to aim at a higher target led to huge increases in cost and lengthy postponements in the timetable, as well as charges and countercharges over where responsibility rested for the new expenses and the delays. The project's original anticipated cost of $150 million, with $30 million coming from donors, rose to $470 million, of which $205 million was raised privately.

The consensus is that the project has been worth it, and the most unimpeachable evidence may be the sound made by children who eagerly stand in the streams of water tumbling down the walls of Crown Fountain, a remarkable work by the Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa, that occupies the southwest corner of the park at Michigan Avenue and Monroe Street. Fountains are historically associated with parks, but this one deviates strikingly from tradition. It comprises two 50-foot prismatic structures, clad in glass block, facing each other across a black granite plaza. The towers, whose completion required the technical services of Chicago architects Krueck & Sexton, are so constructed that water pumped to the top of each interior washes to the edges and descends in alternating trickles and cascades. On the inside wall of each tower am projected, from within, portraits of various Chicago citizens (1,000 were photographed for the installation) whose distinctive faces--smiling or contemplative, eyes open or closed--morph serially from one to the next. Every few minutes a stream of water will pour from the lips of the image, and some children will station themselves happily beneath it, while others--and adults, too--wade with comparable pleasure in the water that has filled, to a level of two or three inches, the shallow basin at the foot of the towers. The kids are as surely responsible for the effect of the work as is Plensa. Much has been made of this interactiveness and the implication that Millennium Park is in accord with the communal habits, values and ambitions of the information age.

A similar relationship between artist and audience unfolds at the base of an extraordinary monumental sculpture by the Indian-born Anish Kapoor, long resident in London. Shaped like a giant kidney bean and weighing 110 tons, it is large enough to command the whole park, its two bulbous ends resting on a platform paralleling Michigan Avenue. Since the form is 60 feet long and 30 feet high, pedestrians can walk through its elevated midsection. Most of them stop and look upward at the stainless-steel surface, so highly polished that they can see their reflections, plus those of their neighbors and the surrounding area, all displayed with precision despite the fascinating distortions caused by the curvilinear skin. There is much milling about and conversation and frequent laughter, as the bean communicates directly with the people, and the people just as easily with each other. Kapoor has called his sculpture Cloud Gate, a title that--in view of the work's obvious likeness to a legume--is used by no one but guides and journalists.

The artist wanted the piece, which utilizes a steel skeleton, to be built by Performance Structures, a ship building firm in Oakland, chosen for its ability to produce a nearly invisible weld between plates. Construction was to have taken place in California, with the finished object delivered to the Chicago lakefront by cargo ship. That decision was later changed out of considerations of safety. The work was assembled at the Millennium| Park site.

The Plensa and Kapoor selections bespeak the sound planning and critical rigor that went into creating Millennium Park in its entirety. Invited to the competition for the Crown Fountain, won by Plensa, were Maya Lin of Vietnam Memorial fame and Robert Venturi, one of the major figures of the postmodernist architectural movement. Whereas Kapoor's sculpture was chosen and built, another proposal, a huge slide by Jeff Koons, wins turned down.