It's the Chicago Way: another project overbudget and late-on-arrival.
And it's at Millennium Park, natch.
A pavilion -- with a scheduled run of four months at the park -- is already six weeks overdue and just got a new contractor.
Maybe next year?
"The news last week that there'd been a change in contractors for the Zaha Hadid-designed Burnham Centennial pavilion in Millennium Park wasn't surprising," Deanna Isaacs writes in the Reader.
"Weeks after its projected June 19 opening, the Hadid structure -- one of a pair intended to symbolize 'Chicago's bold thinking about the future' -- was still encased in a construction tent, like a giant insect stuck in its cocoon.
"Late is fate at Millennium Park, which opened four years after the millennium turned. But this project -- which began with the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee hiring London-based Hadid and Amsterdam's Ben van Berkel to express the spirit of Chicago, and will apparently end with a tribute to Daniel Burnham that looks like a grounded blimp parked next to a playground slide gone wrong -- couldn't afford a two-month delay when it's only scheduled to stay up for four. Something had to give."
The delay is at least good news for the Elgin company picking up the contract, which replaced an Evanston firm.
"Because of an accelerated timetable because of construction delays, Fabric Images pitched a tent on location and moved 11 employees, members of its sewing and metal-working teams, to the work site," the Northwest Herald reports.
The new opening date is August 1, and the skin started to go on this week, but architecture writer Lynn Becker has another idea:
"Like pretty much everyone else, I'm hoping they make it and we get to see Hadid's vision in full flower," Becker writes. "If, however, we get to August 1 with completion still nowhere in sight, I suggest this: Tear down the construction tent. Rip away all the pretty fabric. Let the bare lattice of that amazing aluminum tube frame stand alone as the celebration's most potent and faithful symbol - of failure."
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
