FACULTY BOOK EXCERPT: ‘MILLENNIUM PARK’
“Now everyone who visits Millennium Park can take the memory home with them,” says Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley of Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press, 2006). The book, by Timothy Gilfoyle, PhD, Loyola professor of history, is a readable and lavishly illustrated history of the park’s creation.
Millennium Park does not celebrate progress, stability, or nationalism. It avoids the traditional themes of commemorative art. Moreover, the art of Millennium Park eschews modernism’s tendency to emphasize the artist’s singular right to self-expression.
Millennium Park offers something distinctive. Through the use of scale and color, the pavilion, bridge, fountain, garden, and sculpture relate to and engage in an architectural dialogue with the surrounding skyscrapers and lake. Each component was designed to stimulate a reaction from viewers. Observers look into a sculpture, walk on water, listen to music, pass through a prairie landscape, or cross a bridge. The art still privileges the individual (like much of the modern movement), but the viewer, not the artist, interprets the art. “To a large extent, all work is incomplete,” believes Anish Kapoor, sculptor of the park’s Cloud Gate.
“It’s completed by the person who is looking at it.”