New band shell sweet music to artist's ears

updated 5:09 p.m. ET July 16, 2004

CHICAGO - It’s not open yet, but visitors are already walking up to the chain link fence in Millennium Park to peer at the soaring band shell designed by famed architect Frank Gehry.

The 120-foot-high outdoor music pavilion — with a stage surrounded by billowing ribbons of shimmering stainless steel — has been compared to a boat’s sail, a cloud, even an exploding soda can.

But it’s the acoustics and the innovative sound system hidden in an overhead “trellis” of crisscrossing steel that has the musicians who will call the pavilion home “just beside themselves,” said Jim Palermo, artistic and general director of the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus.

“They say it’s the best stage acoustics they’ve ever sat on. They can hear each other front to back, side to side,” Palermo said. “There’s no other place like it in the world.”

Formally named the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the $52 million band shell between Lake Michigan and bustling Michigan Avenue opened to the public Friday — the same day as Millennium Park, which surrounds the new stage.

The park was originally meant to be part of the city’s 2000 millennium celebration, but as the vision for the park became more grand, projects were added and deadlines were pushed back. It will open at a cost of $475 million — three times the original estimate. The part features a fountain, elaborate gardens and a sculpture of polished steel plates christened “Cloud Gate” by artist Anish Kapoor.

One of the late additions was Gehry, an architect most famous for his design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and more recently the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

When an earlier plan for a band shell was scrapped, Gehry was recruited.

Fans of Gehry’s band shell believe it will become another architectural icon in a city studded with buildings designed by legends including Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Chicago Architecture Foundation already is offering tours of the park.

But music lovers — and the architect himself — are most excited by the pavilion’s “trellis,” a network of curling steel pipes that arch over an area that can accommodate an audience of 11,000, about 4,000 in seats and the rest on the lawn.

State-of-the-art speakers suspended from the trellis promise to develop a quality of sound not heard at most other outdoor music venues.

“I really love it,” Gehry said as he stood on band shell’s stage.

Gehry worked on the acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl in California but couldn’t persuade officials there to use a cable system to hang speakers. So when the Chicago project came along, he rejected suggestions to place metal poles in the ground every 70 feet to attach speakers.

“When you’re looking at the stage, you’d be in a forest of poles,” he said.

With the trellis, he said, “You feel like you’re in something even though you’re not. It has the sense of being an enclosure and defining the space. And I think it works here because of the Chicago skyline, it creates a definition that separates it from the big buildings all around.”

The pavilion’s stage includes risers for chorus members and a wooden floor and walls. Glass doors protect the stage when it’s not in use. It is expected to host a variety of cultural events, as well as Grant Park Orchestra concerts.

One criticism of the pavilion has been that the audience at the back of the lawn will have trouble seeing the stage.

Gehry said that by the time he joined the project, engineering decisions had already been made that prevented him from dramatically increasing the lawn’s angle, but “I sloped it a little bit,” he said. “I think it’s going to work OK.”

One of his concerns was the Lake Michigan wind, so a model of the band shell was tested in a wind tunnel. It held up fine.

“If it flies away, give me a call,” Gehry said.

Gehry, who called Chicago the “best city, architecturally, of the modern cities,” wanted the band shell to have a “joyful” appearance, and he hoped that Chicagoans would “feel very special that it’s their own thing, that no one else has one like this.”

But some detractors say it’s too similar to Gehry’s other designs. Kurt Hunt, a Chicago architect who regularly stops by the site during his lunch hour, thinks the city should have taken a chance on a lesser-known architect.

“I think it’s sort of a shame they did another Frank Gehry signature project — it’s not original,” he said.

And while he thinks the band shell looks great from the front, other viewpoints disappoint him.

“It’s supposed to look whispery, like music,” he said. “But it looks very cumbersome from certain angles — it looks heavy and clunky.”

Gehry knows that some critics think his designs are too similar. As a lark, he said, he presented an early model of the pavilion in a style reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe — famous for his dictum “less is more.” Gehry said “people were horrified.”

“I can’t escape my language, what I am, who I am. So you’ll recognize my work, I guess. And you recognize Mies van der Rohe’s work,” Gehry said. “I think everybody is stuck with themselves.”

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