Windy City welcomes some ‘wow-chitecture’

CHICAGO —  There is a new playground of public art in Chicago, a picturesque refuge in the center of this public art-minded city. And play Chicagoans do in Millennium Park.

Early Wednesday evening, the air sensuously heavy and warm, the flaxen dusk romantically softening the downtown skyline, this $475-million civic project seemed to redefine public art into a new species of recreational art. Dozens of kids frolicked in Crown Fountain, turning a kitschy installation by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa into a wading pool. Hoards of people oohed and aahed as they ambled under Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate,” a captivating 33-foot-high concave reflective sculpture that rearranges perception like a distorting mirror in a carnival. Hand in hand, couples gamboled through gardens, not yet lush, but maybe one day.

At the center of all this happy urbanism, families convivially picnicked and merrily threw Frisbees on the Great Lawn while the sun set and the Grant Park Symphony earnestly sawed away at Bruckner’s last symphony, the monumental, spiritually profound Ninth. Has it really come to this? Is nothing, anymore, sacred in the simplistic, self-absorbed American obsession with fun?

Perhaps nothing is, anymore. Because, it really was, on some level, fun, or at least amusing. Frank Gehry has done it again.

What made sober, dignified Bruckner acceptable outdoor entertainment for a summer’s night in the city was the Pritzker Music Pavilion, which Gehry designed for the Grant Park Music Festival. Even a quick peek from the corner of your eye as you pass it in a speeding taxi is enough to reveal that the shell, crowned by capricious ribbons of glinting steel, is signature Gehry. Chicago has received it with a rapture to match Los Angeles’ love of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Comparing the new music shell to Disney and the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, local critics are calling the Pritzker such things as “wow-chitecture.” At the very least, Chicago is treating Gehry’s pavilion as the latest architectural monument in the American city that already has the most.

More than that, the Pritzker Pavilion, which consists of 4,000 fixed seats and room for 7,000 more on the lawn, is also being promoted as a whole new way to experience music outdoors. Extending from the shell is an elaborate steel trellis that Gehry designed as an ingenious way to hang a grid of small loudspeakers. This is so visually stunning that you can almost sense the music traveling along the cables. Though physically far from the stage, a listener (or Frisbee player) still feels a kind of tactile connection with it.

The sound system, designed by the local Talaske Group, promises something revolutionary -- a virtual concert hall. The result doesn’t come close to that goal. It is a very good thing too that it doesn’t. If it did, one would have no choice but to shoot down the Frisbees. Nothing could be more irritating than a serious concert in a playground.

Of course, there are seats up front where one hears mostly acoustic sound. The stage, like the interior of Disney, is made from Douglas fir, and in interviews, the players of the Grant Park Orchestra have spoken of hearing themselves for the first time (which is what players always say when they play in a new hall). But those close-up seats proved about the worst place to be Wednesday. The sound had more steel in it than the pavilion’s shell. But Gehry’s steel had far more texture than the sound. Bruckner saw God in the details, as does Gehry. Both are architects, but with so few inner details of symphony apparent, they were not on equal footing.

Everything changed moving back, when suddenly the glory of the Pritzker and the Chicago landscape came into the picture. Through the loudspeakers, one heard a bit more Bruckernian detail, if still not, say, as much as in the cheap Sony CD player in my hotel room. (To be fair, the pavilion has only been open for two weeks, and it may take time to figure out the amplification.) But it worked well enough to create a sensation of musical and architectural monumentality merging. Suddenly I felt connected to the Pritzker trellis, as if the cables were quivering musical tentacles that could carry me to stage and skyline at the same time. It was enough to make you want to throw a Frisbee.

The actual performance, or what could be heard of it, was not noteworthy and didn’t need to be. James Paul, the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, moved the symphony right along. The orchestra has many young players who worked hard, and that was enough. The Grant Park Music Festival is a marvelous gift to Chicago. The concerts are free but for the few rows of seats closest to the stage, where you don’t want to be anyway.

Millennium Park, for all the self-serving hoopla from politicians and press, is also a marvelous gift the city has given itself. And sensible Chicagoans have needed no time to see past any pretense.

Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” has been dubbed the “Bean.” The Crown Fountain has twin 50-foot glass-brick towers from which water cascades. But the interior sides are video projections of faces of randomly selected locals -- something like Bill Viola meets “The Family of Man.” Each face is projected for 12 minutes and then vomits water from its mouth. The effect is gross and hilarious. Children jump under the shower; onlookers laugh and applaud.

But it was Gehry, himself, who best understood Chicago’s down-to-earth character with his BP bridge, which snakes over busy Columbus Drive and leads to a plaza and Lake Michigan. The floor is made of wood planks. The skin is scaly steel. Walk on it and it’s hard to believe you’ve left the ground. But you have. And it’s fun.