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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