Millennium Park turns 20 years old on July 16. Former Tribune architecture critic called the project, “the best thing former Mayor Richard M. Daley ever did.
” With its glistening Cloud Gate sculpture nicknamed The Bean (by the Indian-born, London-based artist Anish Kapoor) and raucous Crown Fountain (by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa), the oasislike Lurie Garden and festive Pritzker Pavilion (by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry), the $490 million, 24.5-acre post-industrial playground, “is the , a dazzling antidote to the gun violence wracking city neighborhoods,” Kamin wrote . The Millennium Park that opened in 2004, four years behind schedule, was a supercharged version of the bland, Beaux-Arts proposal from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that Daley initially unveiled.
In addition to these eye-popping icons, it had more than 50% more acreage. Without those features, which were backed by $220 million in private donations and inserted into the park after construction was underway, Millennium Park would have none of the magic — and few of the ripple effects Chicago enjoys today. “But the park is no Potemkin village or gated theme park,” Kamin wrote.
“It’s a new town square that draws together, if only fleetingly, the residents of a metropolis separated by the fault lines of race and class. It has changed — and continues to change — significant swaths of the city around it.” Though the park has been open for just two decades, visionaries throughout the city’s.
