The Garden of the Phoenix

Inspired by The Japanese House, featured in the Whole Earth Catalog (1968)

The Garden of the Phoenix
http://www.gardenofthephoenix.org/the-garden/the-history

The Garden of the Phoenix is an extraordinary public space of great historical significance and natural beauty that is evolving within Jackson Park – a Garden inspired by Japan and reflecting over 120-years of U.S.-Japan relations within a pastoral landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), America’s foremost landscape architect and the chief of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition’s landscape design.

During the years following the close of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the neo-classical buildings and canals of the famed “White City” were dismantled and Jackson Park was transformed into a rugged interconnected system of serene lagoons with lushly planted shores, islands, and peninsulas.

Central to the 1893 Exposition and today’s Jackson Park is the 15-acre Wooded Island, which includes at its north end the site of the lost Phoenix Pavilion (1893-1946) and a thriving Japanese garden called the Osaka Japanese Garden that was added during the 1930’s. Together, the Phoenix Pavilion and the Japanese garden represented one of the best examples of Japanese architecture and garden design outside of Japan.

Today, as we reflect upon the past, the site embarks on its next evolution as the "Garden of the Phoenix," with the planting of over 120 cherry trees in 2013 around the Columbian Basin and SKY LANDING by Yoko Ono on the original site of the Phoenix Pavilion (1893-1946) scheduled to open in 2016.

     

Project 120 Chicago 
www.project120chicago.org

Founded on August 1, 2013, Project 120 Chicago is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 that partners with the Chicago Park District and the Community to develop and implement plans and projects to holistically revitalize the nationally significant, complex historic urban spaces we call the “South Parks.”

Recognizing the historical, cultural, economic and ecological significance of the South Parks, Project 120 Chicago, in partnership with the Chicago Park District, is leading a team of talented interdisciplinary professionals to plan, develop, and carry out improvements that respect, preserve, and renew the character of the landscape as designed by Olmsted, while addressing current and future issues and needs that will promote ecology and community vitality and livability for generations to come.

The Garden of the Phoenix Foundation

http://www.gardenofthephoenix.org/

The Garden of the Phoenix Foundation was established in 2009 as a not-for-profit organization in order to partner with the Chicago Park District to ensure that the Garden of the Phoenix is maintained and enhanced as an extraordinary public space for all visitors to learn about Japan and experience Japanese culture while enjoying a place of great historical significance and natural beauty.

  

SKY LANDING by Yoko Ono (June 2016)

http://www.project120chicago.org/plans_projects/p2-skylanding

The City of Chicago is proud to announce the construction of SKY LANDING in the Garden of the Phoenix in Jackson Park, which will be the first permanent work of art by Yoko Ono in the Americas, and a marker of her place as an artist of profound international influence and of her lifelong mission for world peace.

Upon her first visit to the footprint of the original Phoenix Pavilion on the Wooded Island in 2013, Ono felt the powerful sense of place and digested the history of the pavilion’s creation as well as the story of its demise. She recalled,

I want the sky to land here, to cool it, and make it well again.

Perhaps it is because of her years spent traveling the globe that Ono feels so connected to the elements. The sky has held a powerful significance for the artist since her youth when she and her younger siblings were sent to the countryside in the spring of 1945 to escape the bombings of Tokyo.

Towards the end of the Second World War, I looked like a little ghost because of the food shortage.  I was hungry. It was getting easier to just lie down and watch the sky. That’s when I fell in love with the sky, I think.

Since then, all my life, I have been in love with the sky. Even when everything was falling apart around me, the sky was always there for me.

It was the only constant factor in my life, which kept changing with the speed of light and lightening. As I told myself then, I could never give up on life as long as the sky was there.

SKY LANDING brings this child’s sense of hopefulness to the public realm and the intention is that visitors will feel a communal connection to earth and sky when experiencing the work.

Have sky in your life to protect you. Without it, you will just be a part of the earth.

SKY LANDING will become a place of congregation and contemplation and will be installed in harmony within the existing surrounding gardens and habitats of Jackson Park.