With 2009 on the horizon, Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago, the nation’s first feat in metropolitan planning, will look at its one-hundreth year as both an urban and regional standard. So, without much further ado, Chicago will welcome two of the world’s most renowned architects, Zaha Hadid and Ben van Berkel, to erect pavilions in Millennium Park next June to inaugurate the city’s greater involvement in the Burnham Plan Centennial Celebration. “The message of the Centennial is that a hundred years ago, Burnham really thought forward about the city, and a hundred years later, we need to do it again,” states Burnham Plan Centennial Committee’s Executive Director Emily Harris. Keeping up with Burnham’s commitment to think ahead, the pavilions will boast a green philosophy, as they will only be temporary, which will facilitate local artist Dan Peterman’s endeavor to incorporate them into an artistic, yet functional, structure that will be placed somewhere within the city. “Thinking forward and making sure it continues will become a way of thinking,” Harris says. “If we think globally and work together, we can make big change and it will benefit all of us.”
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