clipped from: themoment.blogs.nytimes.com   

Seeing Things | A City With a Plan

Hadid's Burnham Pavilion is not yet completed
A rendering of Zaha Hadid’s Burnham Pavilion, now on view at Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Chicago, a city known for its civic pride, has a lot to be proud of this year. Last week marked the beginning of an ambitious summer-long program of events to celebrate the centennial of the architect Daniel Burnham’s visionary 1909 Plan of Chicago, which transformed the gritty city into a “city beautiful.” Two temporary pavilions in Millennium Park — one designed by the London architect Zaha Hadid and the other by Ben van Berkel of UN Studio in Amsterdam — are the heart of the celebration.

Van Berkel describes his canopy-like steel structure as an 'urban activator'
Ben van Berkel’s Burnham Pavilion is now on view in Chicago’s Millennium Park.
Chicago has produced many fine architects, so why the imported talent? Joseph Rosa, the architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, who drew up the short list at the centennial committee’s request, explained that since the inspiration for Burnham’s plan for Chicago
was Baron Haussmann’s
famous
19th