EDITORIAL: Lessons from the Windy City: Make no small plans…
By Bill Settlemyer
Executive Publisher
I’ve taken several business trips to Chicago, but this one was different because my wife and I built in some extra time to play tourist.
The timing was perfect. We arrived just before the scheduled opening of the spectacular new Millennium Park in the heart of the city. This project started out as a $150 million effort but became a spectacular $475 million gift to the city, paid for in large part by private donations. According to the park’s backers, this huge increase was not a cost overrun, but rather a seized opportunity to do something very special for future generations of Chicagoans.
The centerpiece of the park is the Pritzker Pavilion, an amazing outdoor concert venue featuring the soaring architectural sculpting by Frank Ghery. The venue has a crisscrossing open frame over a huge grassy area that defines the space and allows a network of speakers to be suspended over the entire area. To learn more about the park, take a look at the official web site, www.millenniumpark.org, as well as www.millenniumpark.net, which has some great photos of the park.
We walked from our hotel to the opening concert and joined thousands of Chicagoans celebrating their new park. It’s easy to tell when people are in love with their city, and Chicago is an easy city to love. I listened to several TV news interviews with Mayor Richard M. Daley on the morning the park opened. He was modest in taking credit for the project and very focused on his faith in the long-term value of the park to the city and its people.
It’s noteworthy that Millennium Park was designed to be a center for arts and culture, complementing the many other venues in the city created for recreation and relaxation. Great cities understand that arts and culture matter and they manage to share that awareness in ways that don’t just benefit the community’s elites.
Creating a sense of place…
My earlier visits to Chicago had been very brief, giving me little opportunity to give more than a passing glance to the magnificent architecture of the city’s downtown skyscrapers. Chicago is to the skyscraper what Charleston is to colonial and antebellum architecture. All you have to do is open your eyes, look up and say, “Wow.” Just as Charleston’s historic buildings span many years, so Chicago’s skyscrapers present an easily accessible visual history of high-rise construction.
The tradition of great urban architecture appears to keep the quality high in Chicago. You certainly have the sense that developers and architects feel challenged to avoid shortchanging the city by cutting corners and putting up poorly designed and unattractive buildings.
Here in our region, the challenges are different, but many opportunities lie before us if we have the vision to seize them. Fitting new construction into Charleston’s historic district has always been a challenge. The Architectural Review Board, preservation groups, architects and developers have struggled over the years with the question of how to design new construction and how to avoid overwhelming the delicate fabric of 18th and 19th century streetscapes.
Some have argued that the result is a bad compromise, with new buildings masquerading as faux historic to avoid harm to the streetscape. Looking back over the last 20 years that I’ve been watching this process, I’d say that we’ve done a fair job in meeting a very difficult challenge. That said, fans of good design could certainly point to many buildings that missed the mark, some of them recent.
New opportunities beckon…
The most important message that Chicago holds for us is that we must care about how we design, build and maintain our entire region. Good planning, great architecture and appealing public spaces do not happen by accident in growing urban environments. You have to set policies and seek consensus whenever possible. Community, business and civic leaders need to be constantly engaged in this process to make it work.
I like the Towne Centre shopping complex in Mount Pleasant. Obviously many others do too, because parking is really tight most of the time. I like the I’On development, and if you look at the housing prices there, you’ll see clear evidence that quality and attention to detail pays off.
More and more, I like the way Daniel Island and its town center are developing. It has a pleasant and approachable feel to it.
And not to sound like a broken record, but the Noisette Project in North Charleston and the emerging plans for the Charleston Neck area have tremendous potential to create a higher-density urban environment that will help our region grow while creating great opportunities for people to work, shop, live and enjoy themselves without spending half their time on the road.
I have a wooden sculpture hanging on the wall in my office—something I picked up on a visit to Asheville, N.C. It has this inscription:
In my dream, the angel shrugged and said
if we fail this time it will be a failure of imagination
and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand
Maybe that sounds a bit too “New Age” for your taste. But then again, maybe it’s just your lack of imagination. Think about it.
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