TOPOS: "Backflip"

“Millennium Park, which opened in July 2004 in downtown Chicago, is a runaway popular success. In 2017, it surpassed Navy Pier as the number-one tourist attraction in the State of Illinois. Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (a.k.a. The Bean) is now an internationally recognized icon of Chicago, and even the city’s popular Christmas Tree, raised in Daley Plaza annually since 1966, was moved to Millennium Park in 2015.

Yet Millennium Park is also marked by contradictions: a park for the third millennium organized by anachronistic, Beaux-Arts balustrades; a resource for all Chicagoans in closest proximity to a booming upscale residential population; a park celebrated by landscape architects that was born out of the flat files of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But how does it measure up relative to the premises of “landscape urbanism,” the influential theory launched in 1997 at an eponymous symposium in Chicago itself?”

O’Shea, Conor. “Backflip: Millennium Park, Chicago,” Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design vol. 104 (September 2018): 110-111.