Pleasure Ground
During the late 19th century an upsurge in dominion of the public realm was imminent as cities begin to increase in population and infrastructural density. Such characteristics oriented the local populations into more remote and green locations where city stress and agitation were nonexistent. This could be acknowledged particularly in Chicago, as it was quickly growing as an industrialized city when Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago introduced Millennium Park on an existing industrial wasteland. Millennium Park shows resembling pleasure characteristics behind Rem Koolhaas’ The Technology of the Fantastic, as a park that accomplishes an escape from the urban environment, intensification of the unconscious, and self-generating pleasure.
Millennium Park can be considered a pleasure ground potentially for its location within the city. Located in the edge of the Loop, and restricted from any expansion of its surface due to streets and walkways, the park lies nested within the raucousness and tumultuous activities of the urban city. The condensed boundaries that denote the park are responsible for reinforcing the pleasure behind the activities performed in the park. Within these boundaries is a world class installation of art and architecture that disperses a demanded pleasure to its urban users. Millennium Park covers 24.5 acres of open recreational space designated to the explicit use of people who live in the city. Coney Island, as described by Rem Koolhaass in The Technology of the Fantastic, resembles an influence in the design of Millennium Park in the same way. Coney Islands originated as a pleasure ground for the modern urban citizen. “Coney Island is the logical choice for manhattans resort: the nearest zone of virgin nature that can counteract the endeavors of urban civilization”. Coney Island is 442 acres of rural land located 14 miles from New York City. Millennium Park is located in the center of down town Chicago, yet achieves the same sense of separation and remoteness at a smaller scale.
Millennium Park consists of various individual entities within the park that can resemble the rides and attractions of Coney Island. Millennium Park’s attractions are not of mechanized and automated infrastructures, yet still accomplish to transform the user’s unconscious. Amongst the most remarkable features Millennium park has to offer is the Promenade Central located in the centric East side of the park, capable of housing large crowds and hosting one of Chicago’s most iconic sculptures, the Cloud Gate. The Lurie Garden located in the east corner of the land, functions as an official entrance to the park, by mesmerizing the user as he strolls between colossal walls of green and vegetation leading into a central promenade and lawn to get struck subsequently with excitement by another attraction. Yet, the strolling performed is not that as described by Frederick Olmsted where, “We want a ground to which people may easily go after their days work is done, and where they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets, where they shall, in effect, find the city put far away from them.”The allocation of this walls reinforce the perception of distant and separation of the urban environment, as only the peaks of certain towers are visible, but only work as transition to a constant intensification of feelings.
These facilities don’t only enhance the cognitive perception of the user but insightfully begin to promote interaction with them. This feature in the park achieves exhilarating reactions, and due to its exotic theme constant physical interaction. Wrigley Square Monument, The Crown Fountain, and McCormick Tribune Plaza are all entities with individual design and scheme that submissively begin to resemble those diversions from Coney Island. Although each in individual nature, the conglomeration of all various entities begins to read as a cohesive landscape of entertainment. This attribute can be acknowledged on Dreamlands origin in Coney Island. “Reynolds lifts many of Dreamlands components from the typology of pleasure established by its predecessors but arranges them in a single programmatic composition in which the presence of each attraction is indispensable to the impact of the others.”
Millennium Park is composed of various distinct attractions that correlate amongst themselves. These attractions carry both social and economic advantages to the park. The Jay Pritzker Pavilion, The Great Lawn, and the McDonalds Cycle Center, host indistinguishable audiences as Coney Island did in addition. In contrast to the multiple halls, ballrooms, and theaters that Coney Island parks contained, Millennium Park is able to mimic their aesthetic and social effects at its current urban location and scale.
Millennium Park achieves self-generating pleasure as it entitles itself a series of different pavilions, galleries, and promenades all of which can host unlimited variations of art, culture, and technology. It is through this facilities that the park portrays continuous self-generating pleasure. Dreamland for example, contained Lilliputia, the Midget City, Creation, and the Incubator Building, facilities that taught and enlightened the contemporary urban civilization. Such entities did more than entertain and pleasure the audiences, but introduced new mentality simultaneously. Millennium Parks unbiased attraction designs resemble this equivalent outcome, as they promote urban social welfare and combat the “urban vice and social degeneration” of the time.
Millennium Park can be considered a pleasure ground, but only under the proper characterizing of what a park can achieve. Millennium Park alike Coney Island accomplishes an escape from the urban environment, through its centric location and design. Millennium Park intensifies the unconscious of the urban citizen for it contains various diverse attractions at disposal. It generates pleasure in the audiences through this attractions that inculcate new social and cultural ideologies, hence perpetually influencing the urban society.