The White and the Black: Mies's Federal Plaza overrun with Dîner en Blanc

I knew what was up the moment I saw them at the Fullerton L stop.  Young people, elegant dress, all in white, carrying food, wine and flowers.  I had seen it all before.  Two years ago, to be exact, when I came upon similar groups making their way up Michigan Avenue.

So I followed them.  I had to follow them, because of the entire group, only one person knew where they were going, and they weren't telling.  The mystery is part of the deal.  We wound up getting off at Jackson, and once up on the street, you could see the passersby stopping and taking a puzzled look at the now multiplying globs of dressed-to-kill humanity narrowing in on their objective.

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By the time I got to Adams street it had become an almost continuous parade, honing in on the ultimate, now disclosed location, the west plaza of Mies van der Rohe's Federal Center.

If you haven't guessed by now, what I was observing was not some unworldly cult, but this year's  Dîner en Blanc, the Chicago edition of an annual event that began in Paris 27 years ago with a picnic at the Bois de Boulogne where the guests were told to wear white so they could more easily find each other.  According to Celia Rodriguez in Forbes, the event has now spread to over 70 cities worldwide, and in excess of 100,000 attendees. The event is invitation-only.  This year's Dîner along the Hudson in New York drew 5,000 participants - and had a waiting list of 35,000.

I'm not sure I saw a single black face in this official promotional video.   At the Federal Center people of color were more in evidence, although men appeared to be seriously under-represented.  What the video demonstrates, despite its boosterish editing and music (turn off the sound), is how Dîner is to a large degree an architectural encounter.  Such see-and-be-seen elegance requires an appropriate stage set, and Dîner events clearly seek out the most spectacular venues in each of its cities.  Last year, it was Jeanne Gang's Lincoln Park Nature Boardwalk.  Two years ago, it was at Pioneer Plaza, where the celebrants dined and danced enveloped by the Equitable Building to the east, Tribune Tower to the North, Illinois Center across the river to the South, and the floodlit Wrigley Building towers to the west.

This year, the setting included not just the Federal Center, but Holabird and Roche's landmark Marquette Building, and the patchwork-repaired facade of Burnham's Edison Building.

Amidst all the food and wine and other beautiful young people just like yourself, architecture may not be the first thing on your mind, but the buildings and infrastructure are so omnipresent that over the course of the evening they become absorbed.  They become a part of you.  The feeling of being within their embrace stays with you, much as after spending days on a boat, you still feel the rocking when you next go to sleep on dry land.

For those of us who visit the Loop on a regular basis, or work there every day, the great buildings often disappear into the blinders of our rote journeys.  And for some, Mies's masterworks have become the poster children for a depersonalizing modernism.

The Dîner event last Friday was an invitation, for attendee and observer alike, to take the time to pause and rediscover the richness of Chicago's architectural landscape.  Zoom in and you saw a thousand distinctive human forms, a thousand distinctive stories.

Zoom out and you saw the bees on holiday, happily partying beside the spectacular hives they had constructed.  Implicit are the ethical and experiential questions.  Imposing or crushing?  Demoralizing or enabling?  Mies loved the grid, both horizontal and vertical, but transparency was his watchword.  Scale, too.  The dialectic between the tall Klucynski Building tower and the single-story, single-room post office.  One a bastion, the other an "almost-nothing" structure of near-complete openness. These were your dinner companions no less than the people sitting next to you.

The great white swarm overrunning the Federal Center plaza confounded and complimented Mies's dark, black, continuous steel i-beam personification of order out of chaos, with Calder's Flamingo rising up and pulsing red with the gathered desire of its beating heart

From 2013:

Flash Mob All-in-White Diner Pops up in Pioneer Court

Flash Mob All-in-White Diner Pops Up in Pioneer Court

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It was like Richard Meier had bled all over Pioneer Court.   The usually underpopulated plaza had become a sea of white - tableclothes, linens, shirts, party dresses and . . . bowling pins.

What gives?

If you were anywhere near the Michigan Avenue bridge Thursday night, you probably saw women in elegant dresses improbably trundling down the street with collapsible tables and folding chairs under their arms, followed by hunter-gatherer males carrying food in everything from classic picnic baskets to see-through plastic bags.  It looked like a man's paradise, with an almost indecently favorable ratio of XX's to XY's.

They all converged on Pioneer Court, set up their tables if they had 'em (this year the event also supplied the furniture), rolled out the tablecloths, laid out the food and candles, and transformed the plaza into the city's largest upscale outdoor dining hall.  Onlookers regarded the scene with a mixture of amusement and astonishment.

Dîner en Blanc (DeB) Chicago is the officially sanctioned version of the French original began by François Pasquier in 1988.  It now includes events in over 40 cities on five continents.  The rule was everyone dressed in white to make it easier for the participants to find each other.  People buy tickets, which usually sell out fast.   They're instructed to bring their own picnic dinner and supplies, which can be in any color as long as they're white.  Alcohol can be purchased.  Those with reservations are given the date of the event, but the location is kept a secret.  The day of the event, an e-mail or text message directs ticket-holders to one of several staging points from which a guide leads them to the actual location.  Last year's event was in the Dan Kiley-designed south garden of the Art Institute, with Lorado Taft's Fountain of the Great Lakes filling the role of world's largest sidetable centerpiece.

It would be hard to beat this year's setting however, with decor by Bruce Graham/SOM (Equitable Building), Holabird and Root (333 North Michigan), Office of Mies van der Rohe (Illinois Center),  Hood and Howells (Tribune Tower,) and Graham, Anderson, Probst and White (Wrigley Building).

You may recall my writing about a year ago about the need to make Pioneer Court a more active Chicago civic presence.  Tonight, between the Thursday Night Football crowd at the Hood and Howells restaurant and Dîner en Blanc sprawled across the plaza on a balmy, early-fall night, it's hard to conceive how it could have been any more active.

Strangely enough, Chicago has not one, but two annual dining pop-up events.  Chicago in White, which in previous years set up shop in Daley Plaza and the Merchandise Mart, will incite its own flash mob this coming Sunday, September 22nd.