Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark

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Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Format: Book
Pages: 442
Publisher: Chicago University Press
Date Published: Sep 2006
Stock Code: 57743
Binding: Hardback

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Description

At its opening on July 16, 2004, Chicagos Millennium Park was hailed as one of the most important millennium projects in the world. Politicians come and go; business leaders come and go, proclaimed mayor Richard M. Daley, but artists really define a city. Part park, part outdoor art museum, part cultural centre and part performance space, Millennium Park is now an unprecedented combination of distinctive architecture, monumental sculpture and innovative landscaping. Including structures and works by Frank Gehry, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa and Kathryn Gustafson, the park represents the collaborative efforts of hundreds to turn an unused railroad yard in the heart of the city into a world-class civic space and in the process, to create an entirely new kind of cultural philanthropy.

This book is a biography of this phenomenal undertaking, beginning before 1850 when the site was part of Lake Michigan. The author studied the history of downtown, spent years with planners, artists and public officials, documented it at every stage of its construction and traced the skeins of financing through municipal government, global corporations, private foundations and wealthy civic leaders. The result is a thoroughly readable and lavishly illustrated testament to the park, the city and all those attempting to think and act on a monumental scale. Underlying the history is also a revealing study of the globalisation of art, the use of culture as an engine of economic expansion and the nature of political and philanthropic power.