A series of articles exploring Chicago, Illinois-the site of the 2009 ICA Conference-began in the December Newsletter. The "Windy City" is one of the culturally richest cities in the world, and a major influence on international art, commerce, and education. December's article discussed the Magnificent Mile, the city's premier shopping district and the actual location of the ICA Conference. In this issue, we examine one of the city's most recent, but most signature, developments: Millennium Park.

Located in the northwestern corner of the much larger Grant Park-now famous as the location of Barack Obama's victory party-Millennium Park was for 150 years a utilitarian parcel: until 1997 it held tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad and an automobile parking lot. The city of Chicago regained control of the land from the railroad and in 1998 announced its plans for a grand civic center to be built over the tracks, featuring the work of renowned architect Frank Gehry. Opened in 2004 after 6 years and $475 million (4 years overtime and nearly triple its original budget), the park had evolved into a masterpiece of green engineering and a large and permanent exhibition of not only Gehry's designs, but those of several postmodern artists, architects, and landscapers. It is crammed, in fact, with cultural features and pieces of public art that have in just 5 years made Millennium Park the second largest tourist attraction in the city.

Like the conference hotel, Millennium Park is located on Michigan Avenue, six blocks south and across the Chicago River from the Magnificent Mile section. Its main entrance on Michigan is in the center of its two-block stretch, at McCormick Tribune Plaza. The first section of the park to open, the Plaza is a multipurpose, open-air venue that serves from November to March as a large ice skating rink. For the remainder of the year, however, the Plaza serves as the Park Grill Cafe, a 150-seat outdoor restaurant serving gourmet American fare and ethnic dishes with an American touch. The cafe is actually an extension of a 375-seat indoor restaurant, also called the Park Grill-the roof of which serves as another outdoor patio known as the AT&T Plaza. This plaza is primarily the host to the Cloud Gate, better known to Chicagoans as "The Bean": a 110-ton, polished stainless-steel arch shaped like a kidney bean that serves as the gateway to the main section of the park. The sculpture's mirrored surface is meant to emulate liquid mercury in its reflection and, owing to its shape, distortion of the Chicago skyline.

To the north of McCormick and AT&T Plazas (on your left as you enter the park) sits Wrigley Square, a tree-lined lawn that often hosts outdoor music performances and art and photography exhibitions. At its far north end, the square features the Millennium Monument, a colonnade of Doric Greek columns that faces a public fountain. The colonnade is a replica of a similar set of columns that sat on the same spot from 1917 to 1953 and then, as now, served as a popular downtown meeting place. South of the plazas is an even more spectacular landmark. The Crown Fountain, designed by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, is a black granite reflecting pool bound by a pair of 50-foot glass towers. The towers are covered by light-emitting diode (LED) displays that depict the faces of Chicago residents, who are photographed all over the city and congregate at the fountain to see if their faces will appear. The towers also feature nozzles that are situated at the mouth level of the faces they broadcast; jets of water shoot out of the nozzles so that it appears that the faces on display are spitting water into the fountain. Above both Wrigley Square and the Crown Fountain are the North and South Boeing Galleries, narrow spaces that host rotating installations of sculpture and visual art.

These sections facing Michigan Avenue are cut off from the rest of the park by Chase Promenade, a wide open-air walkway lined with trees. East of the Promenade is the centerpiece and most famous feature of Millennium Park: the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. It is a band shell designed by Frank Gehry and is most notable for the crisscrossing overhead trellis that covers both the seated area and the ovular Great Lawn that lies behind it. The trellis is not merely for distinction, however: it holds a system of speakers and acts as a sonic buffer, so that the outdoor venue emulates the acoustics of an indoor concert hall. The pavilion building itself is also designed to reflect sound outward into the audience, and also features Gehry's architectural trademark of an elaborate and abstract stainless steel headdress. It is large enough to accommodate a 150-person orchestra; there are also 4,000 seats, and the Great Lawn can hold up to 7,000 additional spectators. The New York Times describes its stunning design as "a celestial gateway to another universe."

The Pritzker is not, however, the only performance space in the park. Behind it, on the park's north side, is the indoor Harris Theater for music and dance. The 1,525-seat venue, most of which is underground, is Chicago's premier theater for small and medium-sized performance groups. It is the home of groups such as the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Chicago Opera Theater, and the Chicago Sinfonietta orchestra. The Harris Theater is a nonprofit venue that underwrites two-thirds of its home performers' daily usage costs and provides marketing and technical services for free. During the ICA Conference, the Harris will house the Chicago Opera Theater's production of Owen Wingrave by British composer Benjamin Britten. (tickets)

At the south end of Millennium Park, behind the Great Lawn of the Pritzker, lies the Lurie Garden, a 2.5-acre combination of perennials, bulbs, grasses, shrubs, and trees. Because Millennium Park is built above an underground parking garage and railroad tunnel, Lurie Garden is officially recognized as the largest rooftop garden in the world.Sixty percent of its plantlife is indigenous to Chicago (although the gardens do not include annuals, which do not survive Chicago winters). The highlights of late spring, when ICA will be in Chicago, include Star of Persia, Arkansas Blue Star, Wild White Indigo, Quamash, Shooting Star, Prairie Smoke, Virginia Bluebells, Herbaceous Peony, Phlomis, Meadow Sage, and Burnet.

There is one other natural product cultivated in Millennium Park: solar power. At the edges of the park near the Pritzker Pavilion and Great Lawn stand four solar energy-generating buildings, the Exelon Pavilions. Taken together, the four pavilions process enough power to provide electricity for 14 houses, and also provides all of the power used in the pavilions themselves. Incidentally, the northwest pavilion-behind the Pritzker Pavilion by Chase Promenade-also serves as the park's welcome center, and the site of its only public bathrooms.

Even the park's exit is remarkable. The BP Pedestrian Bridge is another Gehry creation, a winding elevated pathway that leads from the Great Lawn across Columbus Drive, to a plaza in the northeast corner of Grant Park. The bridge is 935 feet long (10 times the length of the street it's meant to cross over), covered with sheets of stainless steel, and uses waist-high parapet walls instead of traditional handrails. Its curved structure is completely freestanding, but gives the illusion of adhering to a winding natural landscape (the mountains of the Pacific Coast Highway, for example), a departure from even Gehry's famously asymmetrical work.

Millennium Park, then, is perfectly named: a creation of civic use and design for a new epoch. It's that avant-garde experience that lures so many curious visitors and proud Chicagoans to explore and frequent the park-which makes it a great place to observe people's interactions with each other and with their environment. ICA attendees will want to include a stop in Millennium Park on their itinerary, whatever else you may wish to do in Chicago.