Comments on: Burnham Pavilion by UNStudio

By: hals pal

hals pal — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:32:15 +0000

Maybe I’m missing the point… I visited this the other day after having already read the mumbo jumbo about how the project responds to Burnham’s Master Plan etc. I went to the project hoping that it would help explain what I could not understand in the renderings. My first impression was that conceptual/theoretical nature of this project is in my opinion quite moot, and you have to accept the project on its own terms… so a few comments.
- The shape does not appear to respond to anything around it and just looks like Ben van Berkel’s ego landed in Millenium Park.
- This project will look great in renderings and photographs, but in person the inadequacies of our current building techniques (or the one employed on this project) are extremely apparent. The surface of the two planes, which look quite machined in the photographs are actually quite wavy and warped and *organic*. I’m not saying that it would have been easy or inexpensive, but the plywood construction seems to have not been the best choice for a finishing material.
- Personally, I hate this trend of chromatically fluctuating LED lights which the project employs. The effect is quite cheap looking, and does not add to the “experience” or mood creating for such a piece. The lighting scheme and placement itself is very well done, but the changing colors just comes off as gimmicky and cheap.
- The end result must have been a huge compromise from previous ideas (like so much of architecture). If one were able to climb up the droops (as so many children have tried) it would not only have been incredibly more experiential to have an elevated view of the city, but it would make the project much more communicative and fun to the general public. I suspect this compromise had to do with safety/building code issues.

Well, its easy to take pot shots at this structure from the peanut gallery, but, inherently it is the job of the architect to foresee the complications in constructability, time schedules, materiality, and the overall experience of one’s public work. In most of these regards it seems that UN studio really overlooked and undercooked this project,. They probably had a team of two underpaid interns coming up with this in one night, then tossed it off to Garofalo and said, “Build it”. Big offices need to be more cognizant of their output. Cities (Chicago), needs to be more inclusive and transparent in their selection of urban design initiatives such as this. Was there any competition? hmm… we have Ghery…. who else. ahh yesss we need a Zaha . These seem like perfunctory choices with questionable returns.

By: FEW

FEW — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:08:48 +0000

Alohahe – I was lucky enough to see some of the early mock-ups of this before it was built. The material is simply plywood! Fantastic work by both UN Studio and Garofalo Architects to get this built on a tight schedule.

By: LOW

LOW — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:18:30 +0000

I bet it’s really fun when it rains

By: pierre

pierre — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:36:57 +0000

somehow the flat sharp squaremess of it all apeals to me far more than the organics.

By: Cody

Cody — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:29:43 +0000

I don’t think its accurate to call it a sculpture – as a pavilion, it is a building type. This pavilion in particular utilizes very well known architectural strategies. For example, an elevated platform with a parallel roof plane – Mies’s Farnsworth House. But rather than using columns to support the horizontal it distorts a roof plane, with a constant surface depth reinforced with a continuous surface profile. The way that the surface profile twists and kisses the ground at a tangent makes it very different from Ingehoven which is a vertical column blended into a horizontal roof. And I honestly can’t think of any Zaha project like this. She uses 3 surface features in her table, but unlike the pavilion, her surfaces are variably thick, bulging and drooping to touch the ground.