skin-deep beauty with content

Skin-deep Beauty With ContentAuthor(s): Robert BensonSource: Log, No. 6 (Fall 2005), pp. 115-121Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765069 .

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Robert Benson

Skin-deep Beauty

With Content

Approaching the Pritzker Pavilion from Michigan Avenue. Photo: Robert Benson.

The Jay Pritzker Pavilion by Frank Gehry is as gutsy a work of architecture as any in Chicago, maybe gutsier. In a city whose commercial architecture set the standard for the modern office tower, it is a decided accomplishment to

design a low structure that holds its own against the street - wall of Michigan Avenue and the high rises on East

Randolph Street, which border its site in Millennium Park. It is even more surprising to discover that the pavilion not only functions well as a concert venue during the summer months, but also remains architecturally and urbanistically captivating during the other seasons, when it is essentially a monumental sculpture. The Pritzker Pavilion, and more

specifically, the trellis that spans the oval of the Great Lawn, actually frames the buildings around it. Its surface is also

vastly more compelling and memorable than the endless variations of cladding used for curtain-walls throughout the

Loop and beyond. Gehry has definitely staked an aesthetic claim here.

Millennium Park was conceived in the late 1990s as an extension of Grant Park northward to East Randolph Street

by covering over existing railroad tracks and below-grade parking with a green space containing various architectural and entertainment amenities. The first plan for the park by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was a 16-acre Beaux-Arts lay- out with gardens, walkways, plazas, allées, and a concert shell that would be the home of the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus and host of other concerts. SOM hoped to add fish sculptures by Gehry at the sides of their proscenium, a

gesture to contemporaneity within a neo-baroque scheme.

Gehry declined the offer. At the same time, the city sought ways to bring per-

formances and other activities to the concert shell during the off-season. Mayor Richard M. Daley demanded a new, larger plan with two additional buildings flanking an ice rink that would become a reflecting pool in the summer. In this new scheme, the concert shell was to be combined with an under-

ground facility that both served as a rehearsal space and housed a 500-seat theater for recitals and small performances. However, this space would be accessible only through the

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underground garage, and the ice rink/reflecting pool idea, despite its appeal, simply did not work technically.

In 1998, the city invited the Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance to relocate to the north end of Millennium Park, which had now grown into a 25 -acre lay- out. The expansion included sculptural installations, prome- nades, and fountains, as well as retail, dining, and beverage services. Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge, designers of an unrealized Harris Theater in 1994, were engaged to revise their plans for a below-grade theater to comply with a city ordinance prohibiting above-grade buildings in Grant Park.1

When Mayor Daley decided against the SOM concert shell, Cindy Pritzker got involved in the park's architectural

planning. According to Ed Uhlir, director of design, architecture, and landscape for Millennium Park, she convinced the design committee to go to Los Angeles and negotiate with Frank Gehry for something more than a pair of fish sculptures. Gehry accepted the commission for the concert pavilion and a bridge over Columbus Drive to the east, which would connect the park to the lakefront.

At the outset, one problem was the relationship between the Pritzker Pavilion and the Harris Theater. Because the theater and the pavilion are open in different seasons, the two facilities could conveniently share a parking structure, load-in facilities, and dressing rooms. But the complex phys- ical relationship between the two stages needed to be worked out. The fly space of the Harris Theater's stage actually rises

up behind the Pritzker's stage. The load-in space for the two theaters is located behind the Harris stage but underneath the Pritzker stage. Much of this Chinese puzzle was deter- mined by the existing structure of the parking garage. Yet while the complicated structural and technical relationship between the two facilities underground can barely be understood without sectional drawings and a guided tour, what

Gehry worked out above ground for the concert stage and

seating area is one of the principal experiences of Millen- nium Park and its most outstanding feature.

Gehry developed four completely different schemes as 1:40 models and set them on a large model of the entire park, including the street-walls of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street. For the final design, a model of the trellis, shell, and so-called Serpentine Bridge was built, further exploring the urban aspect of the project.

The musical pavilion required seating for 10,000 specta- tors: 4,000 in permanent seats on a rake close to the stage, and space for another 6,000 or more on a lawn behind the

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1. The only part of the Harris Theater visible in the park, therefore, is an understated white concrete and glass box that serves as the main entrance on Randolph Street. The Exelon pavilions, two smaller black glass cubes that function as welcome and information center, souvenir shop, and transportation nodes flank it.



"Interior" seating under the OUTDOOR MUSIC PAVILION. PHOTO: Robert Benson.

seats. Such a large outdoor seating area required sophisticated sound amplification. LARES Associates were chosen to sup- ply a layered sound system to create an acoustical space and

provide natural sound quality at even the greatest distance from the performers. LARES first placed speakers on poles in the seating area, but Gehry could not imagine designing a "forest of poles" as part of the concert experience. Instead, he chose to hang speakers from a large open trellis that spans the entire oval lawn and permanent seating area. Supported on thick round columns at its periphery, the trellis is formed of tubular steel in double curves whose overall shape is that of a vault of suppressed arches. The trellis is a major presence, but also gives an unexpected intimacy to the audience area, which would otherwise be missing.

Another issue that Gehry confronted, one he had con- sidered in his unrealized plans for the renovation of the

Hollywood Bowl in the 1970s, was how to create a visual

presence for the stage and the orchestra, whose distance from the vast majority of concert-goers could make the performance seem small and far away. He resolved this problem with a huge composition of curving planes that explode above the stage and hover next to the proscenium. The stage cannot be ignored, whether its large glass doors are open for a performance or closed for a private function. The curving and folded stainless steel planes completely surround and animate the stage and the performance. Although the forms have been described as acoustically enhancing, they are com-

pletely visual and do not help direct sound. Perforated wood

paneling on the stage walls and ceiling plays against the metal, further drawing the eye to the performance. At night, blue lights subtly wash over the stainless steel surfaces, forming yet another contrast with the stage itself.

Without stretching the imagination, these framing surfaces can only be understood as an exuberant scenic setting for the stage itself. The surfaces that face the audience are held in place by a system of steel supports that loosely resem- ble the armature of traditional stage flats. Gehry's stage set is as interesting where the armature is exposed as it is on the side facing the audience. The dramatic quality of the composition viewed from either front or back suggests that the performances, like the architecture itself, are bigger than life.

It is impossible to visit Millennium Park without being engaged by the Pritzker Pavilion. Its dancing forms appear over treetops and at the end of axes of circulation, and even in sight lines between or above smaller buildings in the

Loop. And it is impossible to avoid making comparisons 117



between it and other recent Gehry projects such as the

Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. These works postdate the famous Barcelona fish of 1988, for which Gehry began using CATIA to digitize and manipulate his concepts parametrically.2 CATIA's potential for modeling surface and external shape has allowed Gehry to move more deeply into a formal lan-

guage that can only be identified as expressive form.* In and of itself, expressive form is not new. Those archi-

tects retrospectively labeled "expressionists" by Dennis

Sharp and other historians of the early 20th century - Erich Mendelsohn, Rudolf Steiner, or Hans Poelzig, to name three examples - developed a language of sculptural forms in order to convey a particular idea. The inspiration for each architect was different, but it was generally something spiritual or at least emotional, often monumental, or even cos- mic. The forms were usually characterized by dynamism and transformation, and intended to heighten the building's resonance with the viewer. Mendelsohn attempted to convey, among other things, the impressions left on him by great music, but made his first significant mark with a monument

celebrating Einstein's theory of relativity. Steiner sought to draw viewers visually into a relationship with the spiritual world by distilling his metaphysical research into forms

inspired by Goethe's concept of plant metamorphosis. Poelzig utilized organic monumentality to serve the expres- sion of national Geist . It was as though other invisible but

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2. CATIA, invented by the French Dassault Systèmes, permits his sketching and modeling to be introduced directly into the design process without the inter- vention of conventional working drawings. It should also be noted that SOM was the structural engineer on the Pritzker Pavilion project and used its own in-house software for the produc- tion of the structural design. The term expressive form has been

defined recently in the context of digital design by Kostas Terzidis in his book Expressive Form: A Conceptual Approach to Computational Design (New York: Spoon Press, 200?). My use of the term is not entirely consonant with his definition.



Opposite page: Behind the stage- SET STRUCTURE OF THE PRITZKER Pavilion. Photo: Robert Benson.

powerful forces were at work in their forms. With Gehry, there seems to be no extrinsic content - it

is, at the very least, not part of Gehry's published explana- tion of his work - perhaps because such an approach is seen as unnecessary, unwelcome, or gratuitous. His association with visual artists has led to experimentation with numerous

languages derived from painting and sculpture, languages that challenge conventional spatial perceptions and formal

expectations and that may be described as kinetic, implying potential or impending motion. He has also been inspired by late-medieval Burgundian sculpture, especially the work of Claus Sluter, with its heavy drapery hanging in deep folds and rich mounds of fabric. The desire to reinterpret the three-dimensional fluidity of late-medieval sculptural drapery led him to experiment with many different materials, but the move in the 1990s to metallic surfaces combined with the manipulative possibilities of CATIA has led Gehry to a new level of formal elocution.

In much of Gehry' s work, but especially in the Bilbao

Guggenheim, Disney Hall, or even earlier buildings such as the University of Toledo Center for the Visual Arts, the exterior forms seldom give a strong indication about interior form or space. They are not simple functional shells but dec- orative and sculptural objects as well. In the Vontz Center for Molecular Studies at the University of Cincinnati, it could be

argued that the interior and the exterior speak two formal

languages so different that they only relate because they are

inextricably parts of one architectural entity. By contrast, the dramatic forms of the Pritzker Pavilion, clad in stainless steel and visually "in motion" around the stage, are utterly detached from any interior at all. There is support structure to observe on the obverse planes, but it emphasizes that the essence of the forms is the surface confronting the audience: surface that is fluid and full of folding and unfolding quali- ties, surface that reflects light but also seems to emit light, surface attached to its skeletal armature, but unaffected by the separation of the skeleton from any recognizable body.

People who have suffered emotional loss or who look forward to some event with great anticipation often report having the sensation that their nerves exist just beneath the surface of their skin, and that their skin is very thin, nearly transparent, barely capable of containing the nervous system at all. Given this, they find being quiet difficult, or they may be impelled to restless movement. This condition is curiously analogous to one's experience of the reflective forms and surfaces of the Pritzker Pavilion or other metallic-skinned

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The arcing trellis supports a SOUND SYSTEM AND REFRAMES VIEWS of Chicago's Loop. Top photo COURTESY GEHRY & PARTNERS. Right photo: Robert Benson.

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buildings by Gehry: Much of their architectural life exists in the almost electric quality of their surfaces, as though a nervous system exists just at or below the architectural epi- dermis. Perhaps this nervous aura of the surface is the content of Gehry's expressive form. While Gehry may have no conscious intention of projecting such an idea, his work that resembles draped and folded cloth, or employs folding and

dynamic warping, elicits just such an expressive and palpable response. It is as though the forms were somehow alive, could change momentarily, transform into other shapes, or as Kostas Terzidis might say, that they stand at the threshold of something unknown.

Gehry's Serpentine Bridge (the BP Bridge) connecting the pavilion area with the Daley Bicentennial Plaza on the east side of Columbus Drive also exudes this quality. Much has been made of the bridged serving to block out traffic noise during concerts, but it is experientially remarkable as well. Walking across this long, sinuous path of wood planks bordered on both sides by low, raked walls clad in stainless steel, one follows a calligraphic curve between two skins, as if the body of a snake had been opened and its vertebrae sur-

gically removed to form the path. Here the pedestrian directly encounters the curvilinearity of the design by moving across the bridge. The experience offers a heightened personal con- nection with form and material that does not happen in a

building as large as the Pritzker Pavilion. The gutsiness of Gehry's pavilion clearly relates to the

contradictory sense of refinement and rawness that he achieves as he explores the most unorthodox and uncon- ventional of formal languages with the most sophisticated technical support possible. Sometimes this process leaves

detailing unresolved, as in the edges of metal skin plates that can be abrasive to the touch. His buildings are not always technically perfect. Some audience members in the raked seats at the opening concert on June 15, 2005 - unfortunately a rainy night - had to use umbrellas to shield themselves from rain water spilling from at least one of the billowing stainless steel clouds overhead, because it did not drain prop- erly.4 Nothing so mundane as rainwater should be allowed to interfere with the architectural impact of a work like the Pritzker Pavilion.

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Robert Benson chairs the Department of Architecture and Interior Design at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where HE ALSO TEACHES ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY AND THEORY. HE HAS WRIT- TEN ABOUT ARCHITECTURE FOR MANY NATIONAL AND INTERNATION- ALJOURNALS AND AS ARCHITECTURE CRITIC FOR THE DETROIT NEWS AND the Cincinnati Enquirer.

4. Perhaps over time more ways to pre- vent that kind of nuisance will be writ- ten into the CATIA software now being marketed widely as Digital Project Ecosystem by Gehry Technologies.



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