Tag: chicago

President Barack Hussein Obama wanted a monument in Chicago, and Chicago gave him parkland, patience, tax breaks, years of disruption, and now a tower that looks less like civic memory than self-regard poured into granite.

The Obama Presidential Center opens to the public June 19 in Jackson Park, a historic South Side park once shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision. The Obama Foundation calls it an “awe-inspiring 19-acre campus.”

Many Chicagoans can look at the same structure and see something colder.

The building matches the man’s politics. Obama, the 44th president, sold hope in polished speeches while leaving the country more divided than he found it. My criticism of Obama has never been about race; it’s about ideology, arrogance, and the habit of treating dissent as a moral defect.

His center carries the same spirit: it rises over a working neighborhood like a lecture in stone, built by people who always sound certain they know what is best for everyone else.

The design has already drawn brutal reactions. The main tower has been described as a mostly windowless granite monolith, with critics comparing it to a fortified sci-fi prison.

Architect Billie Tsien, co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, said Obama was “very, very hands-on with the design” and wanted angular forms inspired by sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. From The Guardian:

So, how to sym­bol­ise hope, justice, equal­ity and all the other bygone val­ues that Obama cham­pioned in his met­eoric ascent to the White House? How to com­mem­or­ate the first Black pres­id­ent in his­tory, in whom so much trans­form­a­tional faith was ves­ted, at a time when so many of his achieve­ments are being relent­lessly rolled back?

“We had the idea of a beacon,” says archi­tect Bil­lie Tsien, whose prac­tice, Tod Wil­li­ams Bil­lie Tsien Archi­tects, won the design com­pet­i­tion for the Obama Pres­id­en­tial Cen­ter in 2016, on the eve of the first Trump pres­id­ency. “We thought of four hands com­ing together,” she adds, hold­ing her cupped hands up against a col­league’s, as if pro­tect­ing a flame from the wind.

Above us, sheer walls of gran­ite erupt from the ground at a steep angle, before taper­ing to form a chis­elled 70-metre-high mono­lith. It looks hewn and cleft, tower­ing over the 19-acre cam­pus like a stocky, trun­cated obelisk. Rising above the low-rise, low-income neigh­bour­hood, the build­ing has an omin­ous pres­ence, its mostly win­dow­less heft recall­ing a men­acing sci-fi headquar­ters, with small chamfered open­ings sug­gest­ing portals from where drones might be launched, or lasers fired. Some have com­pared it to a flak tower, oth­ers to a “Klin­gon prison”. If it is a beacon of hope, it seems to be one that has been for­ti­fied at all costs against the present regime, a defens­ive bunker to pro­tect its fra­gile val­ues from siege.

“The pres­id­ent was very, very hands on with the design,” says Tsien, with a rue­ful air. “He talked a lot about his love of Brâncuși.” That’s the Romanian sculptor who was known for his carved, abstract forms. “And he wanted to make things more angu­lar and cut. To make a form, and then try to work out what goes inside it, is really the oppos­ite of how we’ve worked before. It was a very for­eign exer­cise.”

That detail tells us exactly everything we already know; the final product feels less like a public place than a former president’s theory of himself.

The location has always been the deeper insult. The Obama Foundation built the center inside Jackson Park, part of a National Register-listed landscape, after years of lawsuits and complaints from people who objected to turning public parkland into a privately operated campus.

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