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. 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.
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“I wish it had worked out differently,” says Aaron Helfman, owner of TenFab Design, the Evanston company that either handed the project back or was relieved of it, depending on whom you ask. “But nobody knew where it was going. It was like a journey we took together, and then we were like, ‘Oh my God.’ It turned into a much greater and more complex endeavor than anybody had realized.” Helfman says nobody on the planet had done anything like this “amazing structure” before—”the scale and scope, the complexity. And then you throw in a three-month window to make it. The time frame was impossible.”
Committee members and staff were huddled with Thomas Roszak, the local architect assigned to the project, wondering what to do, Harris recalls, when somebody said, “Maybe it’s a tent!” Enter TenFab, whose main business is “tensioned fabric” designs for trade shows. Hadid’s firm redesigned the pavilion with a less expensive, cloth shell supported by aluminum ribs of different sizes. The inner walls would double as projection surfaces for a film about Chicago (assigned to London-based, Chicago-trained filmmaker Thomas Gray).
