All too often, visiting stars such as Ricardo Bofill and Kevin Roche have fallen on their faces when they’ve designed buildings in the architectural mecca of Chicago. But in his powerful and eloquent Jay Pritzker Pavilion and Great Lawn in the new Millennium Park, Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry has proved himself a worthy match for the city of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Even accounting for its relatively minor flaws, the pavilion, the new home of the Grant Park Orchestra, is one of the finest works of architecture Chicago has seen in a decade.
With outdoor seating for 11,000 people — 4,000 in fixed seats and 7,000 on a lawn — the $60.3 million pavilion consists of two interconnected buildings, both full of structural bravura: A band shell with a boldly cantilevered “headdress” of gleaming stainless steel shells that reach 120 feet high, and a trellis of curving steel pipes that forms a heroically scaled, domelike structure, 600 feet long by 320 feet wide. Open to the sky, the trellis sweeps over the entire seating area, supporting speakers that liberate the lawn from intrusive poles.
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Even in a city renowned for its big moves, Gehry’s project makes for an extraordinary structural drama. And the stage on which that drama occurs — a new 24.5-acre park at the foot of the downtown skyline — plays perfectly to the architect’s strengths, allowing his explosively sculptural forms all the room they need to preen, as they were not free to do in his dazzling, but more tightly confined, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
Like that acclaimed design, this one is as much about the spaces Gehry shapes as the objects he creates. What it also shares with the Disney project is the ability to fuse the joy of music with the flux of contemporary life, rendering of these opposites a structural poetry that draws people together in a world that tears them apart. Are Gehry’s metal shells a bouquet of flowers, all silver and festive? Or are they an approaching storm cloud, gray and menacing?
The answer, of course, is both/and, not either/or, which is why this design ought to put to rest the silly question that Gehry is simply repeating the fragmented formmaking of his epoch-defining Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. He has a language like Frank Lloyd Wright had a language, and he keeps on developing it, as Wright developed his. His grammar keeps getting richer as Gehry continues to experiment and bump into new contexts (and new contacts) that push him in new ways. Here, as in Bilbao, he was assisted by the engineers from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, including John Zils.
Covertly symmetrical
Responding to the conservative, beaux-arts setting in which his pavilion sits, Gehry’s design becomes covertly symmetrical — its metal shells flying into the sky, but ultimately balanced; the circular, steel-clad pylons holding up his trellis making a subtle reference to the classical columns of Grant Park.
What’s more, responding to Chicago’s penchant for bare-bones design, his trellis reveals structure rather than concealing it, as he did at Bilbao.
What his work lacks in novelty it makes up in quality.
And that is the ultimate measure of architecture, as Mies himself made clear in his famous epigram: “We don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning.”
To be sure, Gehry’s composition is not perfect. With the backside of its pavilion exposed like a western false front, the design has the same kind of “Queen Anne front, Mary Ann behind” dichotomy that aroused controversy last year in his Bard College performing arts center in upstate New York.
Actually, when it’s seen directly from behind, the exposed backside, with its diagonal support poles bracing the shells, manages to be lively and well-ordered. And the poles have a directness and honesty to them that relates persuasively to the bare-bones beauty of the trellis.
But from the 45-degree vantage point of Randolph and Michigan and spots, they’re a Pick-up-Sticks mess.
In addition, the curving steel pipes of Gehry’s trellis look chunkier than they’re supposed to when seen from Columbus and Monroe Drives, making the trellis seem far less lacy and open than it did in Gehry’s enticing early models. A sound and lighting control booth, located in the center of the fixed seats, is an eyesore and should be removed.
Brilliant and provocative
Still, this is a brilliant, provocative work, and you notice that long before you get to Millennium Park, as the “headdress” dominates the vista down Washington Street (much as the Guggenheim Bilbao commanded a down-the-alley view in Spain) and the trellis sprawls out like a giant skeleton when it’s seen from Madison Street. The latter makes you wonder whether Gehry, who has had a thing for fish since childhood (each week, his grandmother would buy a live carp, which he was allowed to play with in the bathtub until grandma killed it and made gefilte fish) is serving up a giant fish fillet on Chicago’s lakefront.
That, of course, is too literal. The point is that the pavilion engages the city around it rather than being an autonomous object. Further fusing with its surroundings, it transforms the banal corporate towers of upper Randolph Drive — the Aon Center, the Blue Cross-Blue Shield headquarters — into the perfect backdrop for his heavy-metal act. They’re the big, boring mountains. His steel shells are the sexy foothills. Too bold for their setting? Nonsense. Things have to be big in the vastness of Grant Park to get your attention and Gehry’s aim here is deeply democratic: To create a proscenium that has enough visual heft to make even the guy sitting on a blanket more than 600 feet from the stage feel as if he’s connected to the performance. He accomplishes it superbly.
The shells are beautiful, sensuous things — festive and exuberant, even pleated, in a homage to Gehry’s friend, the fashion designer Issey Miyake, who is the master of pleated fabrics. Only the sharp-eyed will observe the structural heavy lifting that makes the drama of the shells possible: A massive steel truss, 11 feet thick, cantilevers more than 100 feet outward from its vertical support. The shells hang from it, allowing them to project over the seating area, as if a wave of sound was emanating from the stage.
The structural muscle of the trellis, in contrast, is out there for all to see, and it’s astonishing, especially when you walk beneath it. Reaching to a height of 60 feet, the basketlike structure is made of curving, crisscrossing steel pipes, 60 feet long, that were welded together to form continuous pieces, some more than 400 feet long.
The pipes are anchored to 6-foot-wide, steel-clad pylons that act like the buttresses on a French Gothic cathedral, stopping the compressive force of the trellis from pushing outward.
A network of thin cables hangs from the trellis. Suspended from the cables, in turn, are speakers that are supposed to produce a high-quality, indoor-type sound when the Grant Park Orchestra and other performers play.
Though the trellis seems a bit chunky from the outside, it’s quite elegant once you step beneath it.
The spatial experience it creates is at once familiar and fresh. Grant Park, after all, is made up of a series of roomlike outdoor spaces framed by trees, and here, Gehry makes a new kind of oval room with a new twist on Chicago’s penchant for heavy metal.
Here, he demonstrates that he’s a maestro of metal, but, in typical fashion, this is not technology for technology’s sake; the trellis is a social as well as a structural gesture, one that creates a single, overarching space that unites those in the fixed seats with those on the lawn.
And for all there is a stunning view of the downtown skyline through the trellis, which magically creates a sense of enclosure even though most of it is open.
As one moves down the slope of the Great Lawn into the fixed seats, which are made of a comfortable plastic and are bright red, there are more spatial surprises: You feel something very unusual for the flatlands of Chicago — you are descending a hill and entering an enclosed space that’s shielded from the clamor of the city.
It’s like a small room within the big room beneath the trellis, and it is closely followed by what happens in the seats closest to the stage: The undulating undersides of the steel shells soar like cumulus clouds over the audience, and the breaks in the shells reveal the muscular structure that’s making it all possible.
Who needs to hear music when you can see this kind of frozen music?
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Well, audiences do, of course, and the stage Gehry has fashioned greatly enhances the making of music as well as being a delight to behold. Its warm walls of Douglas Fir wrap like a cupped hand around the tiered seats for the orchestra and chorus, offering a shape that’s designed to allow the performers to hear each other well.
They’ve even got air-conditioning up there, which will prevent the musicians from sweltering on steamy summer nights. And the big cantilever shelters the players from both sun and rain.
Yes, there will be those who criticize it, who think it too radical or ugly or compare it to an exploded soda pop can. Gehry’s work always provokes such reactions.
But this one has the guts and the glory to weather those storms. Even if it doesn’t rank quite as high in his catalogue as the Guggenheim Bilbao and Disney Hall, it is nonetheless one of his finest works, meeting and in many ways exceeding the daunting challenge of building in the place he himself calls “the greatest city in the world as far as contemporary architecture.”
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Rating the park
Millennium Park is so filled with ingredients that deliver entertainment and enlightenment that we thought a handy guide, rating how each piece works, would be appropriate and fun.
Here’s what our star-ratings mean:
(star)(star)(star)(star): Excellent
(star)(star)(star): Very good
(star)(star): Good
(star): Fair