Lurie Garden at Millennium Park

Chicago's Lurie Garden opened in 2004 and is now a globally recognized symbol and space for dialogue around urban landscape architecture, native-plant gardening, sustainable horticulture practices, insect-and-bird-focused data and experiments, inclusive public garden programming, and equitable training and recruitment into landscape and horticultural fields.

Critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen immediately recognized the garden's strongest attributes: "Architecturally controlled, spatially and topographically varied…a powerful experience of quietude within the city, moments full of wildness, wildflowers, and an ever-changing story about the climate and flora of the Midwestern plains."

The original "Monroe Garden" competition invitation set two goals for the landscape design of the future botanical garden: first, it would be a bold and unique design. Secondly, it would showcase "rare and unusual plants."

We chose to propose a botanical garden in which the "rare and unusual plants" would be those of the site's own ecological and cultural history.

To address the physical design, we first sought to separate the immersive botanical garden experience from the bustle of Millennium Park and the large crowds exciting concerts at the adjacent Pritzker Pavilion.

We split the major pathways so that they flowed around the edges of the site and aligned with Grant Park's larger axes. The 14-foot-tall Shoulder Hedge topiary then wraps and protects the most active edges of the Garden and uses "doorways" to welcome people – in smaller groups – into the more delicate areas of the Garden. Its contoured form is carefully designed to obscure the most distracting "middle ground" surroundings from the view of downtown Chicago's beautiful high-rises, which can then appear to rise directly from the prairie and forests of this ancient land. The message is that real cities and real nature can, in fact, co-exist and may intertwine more in our lives in the future.

Rather than walking across a garden "space" and looking at labeled botanical specimens or isolated beds, as many botanical gardens offer, in the Lurie Garden one moves into a solid and continuous "object of plants:" a place and a community rather than a collection of specimens. The Garden's prairie and marsh themed plantings were designed as a continuous landform rather than as a series of "plant beds." Integrated into this Garden landform, which may at first appear entirely artistic, are many technical and functional solutions that have been developed in parallel.

The plant designer's extensive work with American prairie plants in Europe had proven that magic was possible with Chicago's own native plants, so the landscape architect and plant designer formed a team. This was the plant designer's first North American project, and it brought the best ornamental properties of Chicago's native plants into public view.

Sinking and mixing into this original landscape was the historic fact that Chicago's earliest streets were a muddy mess. In a heroic and extreme transformation, the entire city ground was filled in, raised up, and entirely decked over to become a perfect, crisp surface for a further sky-scraping city. The watery Lurie Garden site was accordingly filled - mostly with the rubble of the old city burned in the Great Fire - framed and decked, to its current elevation on the rooftop of a parking garage, awaiting the Garden that would tell the layered story buried beneath it.

The Dark and Light Plates gardens tell the story of the old vs new, thick vs open, wet vs dry experience of this site and the landscape of Chicago. The two garden Plates meet each other along the historic "change angle" of a diagonal, lakeshore retaining wall that is buried directly beneath the site. The Seam is covered with a wood deck, in the spirit of the city's first streets to leave the natural ground - a key step in raising the entire city and forever changing the outdoor experience in Chicago.

• Shannon Nichol, Lead Designer
• Jennifer Guthrie, Lead Designer
• Kathryn Gustafson, Lead Designer
• Piet Oudolf, Perennial Plantsman
• Robert Israel, Conceptual Review
• Terry Guen Design Associates, Inc., Local Landscape Architect
• KPFF Consulting Engineers, Structural and Civil Engineering

• Landscape Forms — Furniture
• GGN — Furniture
• Iron Age — Drainage/Erosion
• Mankato Kasota, limestone — Fences/Gates/Walls
• Associated Imports, "Rayon Blue" granite cladding — Fences/Gates/Walls
• Jeffrey L Bruce and Co — Irrigation
• Metalmetrix — Structures
• Schuler and Shook — Lighting
• Roy Diblik, Northwind Perennial Farms, Perennial Grower — Other
• CMS Collaborative, Fountain Design — Other