View from Chicago: as these recent projects show, the Windy City is still a place for grand civic gestures and innovative architecture, renewing a tradition that was becoming ossified

'Make no small plans,' declared Daniel Burnham. 'They have no magic to stir men's blood,' Burnham's vision shaped the 1893 World's Fair and the Chicago masterplan of 1909, and that legacy is apparent in Millennium Park, the city's latest showpiece. An original initiative by Mayor Daley to grass over sunken railyards and surface parking along Michigan Avenue, and pay for a band shell with revenue from a three-level underground parking garage, blossomed into an ambitious fusion of art, architecture, and landscape. The site doubled in size, and the budget rose from $150 to $475 million. SOM's prosaic Beaux Arts scheme was set aside, and Frank Gehry was commissioned to design the concert pavilion and a sinuous footbridge over a sunken expressway, forging a link to the green acres of Grant Park beside Lake Michigan. The west side of the 24.5 acre site accommodates two monumental art works, a skating rink, tree-lined paths and lawns, and a replica of the 1917 peristyle that was eventually demolished in 1953.

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Historically, Chicago is the thrusting, can-do metropolis, which became the commercial hub of America within a few decades in the mid nineteenth century, rapidly rebuilt itself as a city of skyscrapers after the devastating fire of 1871, and created a prototype of the City Beautiful at the World's Columbian Exposition. Louis Sullivan denounced Burnham's plaster wedding cakes, 'They will set the cause of architecture back fifty years', but Chicago nurtured Wright and Mies before it fell prey to papery PoMo and the showy glitz of Helmut Jahn. Millennium Park looks forward, while building on the past. It's an old-style civic gesture, in which the city paid for the infrastructure and private and corporate donations for most of the improvements, to create a gathering place for the whole city. There's a solar-powered bike station. Thomas Beebe's black box theatre for music and dance, and Kathryn Gustafson's secluded garden. Summer concerts of classical music are free. At the gala opening, coloured lights splashed over the steel shell, fireworks exploded from the wall of towers along Randolph and Michigan Avenue, while locals swelled with civic pride--an emotion that has vanished from many great American cities, except when the home team wins.

The boldest step was to hire Gehry for such a conspicuous project. Despite the success of Bilbao (AR December 1997) and a score of popular buildings in Europe and the US, his expressive metal forms are still widely perceived as aggressive disruptions in the townscape--though they never seem as threatening once they are built. Here, the challenge was to achieve acoustic excellence and a structure that would embrace the 4000 patrons in fixed seats up front, and the 7000 sitting on a gently sloping lawn beyond. Both needs are met in a three-part structure: a stage house faced with perforated Douglas fit to house the orchestra and choir, a steel plated shell to deflect and contain the sound, and a trellis of intersecting steel pipes that span 90m over the lawn, and support speakers and lights. Close up, you look into what could be a cut-away auditorium; from afar the trellis defines an outdoor room. Digitally enhanced sound is evenly distributed throughout the amphitheatre.

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Project architect Craig Webb devised many iterations of the shell, finding inspiration in a Vermeer portrait of a woman in a starched cap. The final version does suggest a headdress, with tight coils at the top and extended tresses to the sides; an asymmetrical sculpture that mediates between the rectilinear stage house and the arched trellis. Entering from the north you see the pipes that support each curved panel, as though Disney Hall had been taken apart and reassembled, with the steel wrapping open space and the audience rather than an interior volume. The pavilion is designed to be used after dark, when the back wall serves as a screen for changing patterns of light, the wood glows softly, and the steel shimmers in blue light, with a contrasting colour catching the seams and throwing pin stripes across the gleaming surfaces.

Gehry had never built a bridge larger than the one across his home swimming pool, and he rose to the challenge of creating a walkway that snakes along the freeway embankment to shut out traffic noise, spans the roadway on a single supporting column and descends into the park beyond. The parapet is a steel-plated wedge with no need for handrails, and the boardwalk is gently inclined for wheelchair users. The mayor ('a control freak like me', joked the architect) feared the bridge might overwhelm the pavilion. Over lunch, Gehry picked up a knife and tilted it to demonstrate how the sharply angled side would effectively minimize the bulk of the structure.

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The artists were also challenged to integrate their works within the park and realize them on an unprecedented scale, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate is a 110-ton blob of polished steel that reflects the sky and draws in the city. The skin is seamless and the entire structure has to expand and contract as the temperature shifts 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) from winter to summer. Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa created the Crown Fountain from two 15m-tall slabs of steel-framed glass block--high-rise towers in miniature--and placed them in a thin, reflective film of water. He taped close-ups of a thousand Chicagoans, who appear in succession on LED screens within the inner sides of the slabs, moving their features and spewing water like gargoyles. Water then cascades from all sides, drenching kids who have ventured too close, to the delight of all.