Old Convention Center Site--Chicago offers something to think about

Sculpture, incorporating video and other elements, by Jaume Plensa. Located in Millennium Park, Chicago.

Today the Chicago Tribune assesses the first year of the Millennium Sculpture Park in Chicago. Blair Kamin, the architecture critic for the Tribune, writes in "The Millennium Park effect: It has emerged as a sparkling example ... of how big cities can get big things done," that:

The joyful postindustrial playground, which has brazenly discarded the old industrial age model of the serene urban park, is blowing equally strong winds of change across the cityscape that surrounds it, altering a museum's plans, boosting real estate prospects and (perhaps) opening doors for more innovative architecture in a city whose design scene had grown stale as recently as a decade ago. It has emerged as a sparkling example, despite its widely publicized delays and cost overruns, of how big cities can get big things done.

In the national conversation, Millennium Park is being hailed in some quarters as an example of how business and political leaders can pull together -- in sharp contrast to the feuding among powerful interests that has turned the rebuilding of ground zero into a textbook case of civic inertia. "One of the great new models for a new kind of urban park," The New Yorker's architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, told television host Charlie Rose on Rose's show in May.

The article includes links to the special report and online extras that the Tribune published last year upon the opening of the Park.

From the Photographic Ramblings blog by Ken Ilio.

"This fountain, designed by Barcelona-based sculptor Jaume Plensa, consists of a pair of 50-foot glass-brick towers facing each other across a black granite plaza with water cascading down their sides. At regular intervals, the flow of water over the inside face of each tower is interrupted as a giant LED screen behind the glass brick displays the face of one of the 1,000 Chicagoans filmed for the installation. Each face appears for about 15 minutes and periodically the face will purse his/her lips as water pours from a spout creating an illusion that the person is spitting water into the plaza below. The space between the towers is bathed in an eight of an inch of water, deep enough to reflect the images and shallow enough for people to walk across to interact with the fountain or a soak under the cascading water and/or spout."



It makes me think that the Old Convention Center Site is such a key location, and could have a similar transformational impact downtown, in terms of doing some great things with public spaces. Granted that everyone seems to want to put about 20 pounds of their ideas into the 5 pound bag that the site represents (Convention Hotel, Library, National Music Museum, etc.), but part of the space could be utilized in a similar fashion to Millennium Park.

Baring that, there are other opportunities, although not many, elsewhere in the city, perhaps as part of the revitalization of the waterfront areas of the city, or even Freedom Plaza, which I think of as a pretty lousy space most of the time.

Restaurant in the Park. Park Grill diners eat under the Bean Wednesday afternoon in Millennium Park. (Chicago Tribune Photo by John Lee)

One of the problems holding back making public parks more successful in the central core of Washington, DC is that the National Park Service doesn't allow the sale of food anywhere but on the National Mall. This often results in barren spaces such as McPherson Square or the Eastern Market Metro Plaza.

A conveniently located but wasted opportunity.

More images of Millennium Park.

Freedom Plaza, Downtown DC. www.archvision.com

Freedom Plaza, Washington, DC. Successful from above, but a failure on the ground?