Millennium Park to open in Chicago

More than seven years in the making, Chicago's belated Millennium Park is finally scheduled for completion, with a ceremony planned for July 16. The 25-acre park is situated along the city's bustling Michigan Avenue, just north of the Art Institute, in the northwest corner of the sprawling Grant Park. The most prominent feature of the whopping $450-million project is Frank Gehry's open-air music pavilion. The 120-foot-high structure consists of curving ribbons of stainless steel and a trellis--wired with small hanging speakers--that spans the 4,000-seat audience area and an expansive lawn. Also by Gehry, a pedestrian bridge snakes alongside the pavilion and crosses busy Columbus Drive, with the additional purpose of providing a sound barrier against traffic noise. Visitors approaching the pavilion from the south will pass through a garden designed by Kathryn Gustafson, Pier Oudolf and Robert Israel. Arranged in light and dark palettes of perennials, the garden contains plantings not native to the Chicago area.

Artworks by Barcelona-based Jaume Plensa and British sculptor Anish Kapoor also figure prominently in the new park. For his first U.S. public commission, Kapoor has created a 33-by-66-by-48-foot stainless-steel sculpture polished to a mirror finish that will reflect its immediate surroundings, as well as the city beyond and the sky. Visitors will be able to walk beneath the concave underside of the elliptical bean-shaped form.

Plensa's work is a fountain with a 50-foot-high glass-block tower at either end of a shallow (1/8 inch) reflecting pool that visitors can walk through. Water cascades down the towers, which, on their inner-facing sides, will contain LED screens with video portraits of local residents. Periodically, the faces will seem to spout a stream of water into the reflecting pool in the manner of cupids or gargoyles in Roman fountains, Plensa worked with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to photograph 1,000 individuals for the project; it will take about two years for all of them to appear.

Some elements of the park have been open since 2003, including a skating rink, a restaurant, an indoor music and dance venue, and a promenade for fairs and festivals. The final price tag is twice what was foreseen at its conception, making the project a target of widespread criticism. It was largely funded by the city, with $120 million kicked in by individual and corporate donors, including Oprah Winfrey and John H. Bryan, the retired CEO of the Sara Lee Corporation.

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