Historian Timothy Gilfoyle will discuss his new book Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark. Millennium Park is an unprecedented combination of distinctive architecture, monumental sculpture, innovative landscaping and performance center. Gilfoyle’s studied the history of downtown; spent years with the planners, artists and public officials and documented each stage of financing and construction. The result is a thoroughly readable and lavishly illustrated testament to the park and the city as well as a revealing study of the globalization of art, the use of culture as an engine of economic expansion and the nature of political and philanthropic power.

Recorded Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at Chicago Public Library.