Quote:
Originally Posted by sentinel
Um, ok..but what about other buildings already in parks? Garfield Park Conservatory, Field Museum, Art Institute, Peggy Noetebart museum, MSI, Chicago History museum, etc. Don't those also represent precedent? I'm playing devil's advocate because as much as I'm not a fan of the form of the Obama center, I still think cultural institutions are fine in parks.
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Yes, I am perhaps being naive or overly idealistic, but someone should be.
Which of those were grandfathered in before protection ordinances?
You are right, they have set a precedent. So I guess the rebuttal to my thesis is to extend more negative precedent in order to be sure to extinguish the possibility of best practice? Maybe restraining from building large semi-private plazas, edifices, and campuses within our parks is not the best practice. Maybe they are the perfect place for them, but that is a different discussion.
My larger point is that there seems to be very little in the way of actual legal or effective protections if we keep abandoning the idea, in effect, that there should be, in fact, hard and fast protections. The reality seems to be that as long as the right amount of money comes rushing in, a big enough elite or benefactor submits their plan, and the right politicians can push through enough legalese and arbitrary wording to bypass the spirit of designated preservation, that we are just maintaining our limited large parks as earmarked for the footprints of X titan of industry or politician to mark their territory in the parks.
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