The Nostalgic Architecture of the Obama Presidential Center
The nostalgic structure of the Obama Presidential Center
Where hope even has a present store.
The Obama Presidential Center.
(Kamil Krzaczynski / Getty)
“Hope now has a permanent home,” Obama Foundation CEO and former senior adviser to the president Valerie Jarrett tells an viewers of about three dozen reporters in a small auditorium designed for intimate, terraced seating. We are partially of what’s known as the Forum, a piece of the Obama Presidential Center that’s open to the public. Just past these partitions is a restaurant the place one should purchase an Obama Burger, and simply past that’s the Fannie Lou Hamer Walkway, sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, which gives passage to the Nancy Pelosi Garden Pavilion, positioned proper beside the automotive park, maybe an homage to how lengthy the former speaker held her seat in Congress. Farther afield is the relaxation of the heart, which features a museum, workplaces for the Obama Foundation, a number of basketball courts, a department of the Chicago Public Library, and a playground.
Tina Tchen is right here to announce the basis’s new management initiatives, that are about as revealing as the perfunctory placards and memorializations of “hope” and “change” throughout us. These embrace a mid-career program for “the next generation of leaders”—not solely “NGO leaders,” we’re instructed, however“folks who are military leaders, who are in government, who are in business, big and small, who are in academia.” Among the individuals, Jarrett continues, “we have a young man who is currently the deputy mayor for sustainability in the city of London. We have Emmanuel Macron’s economic adviser. We have a woman in our last class who was the director of the Kosovo Army military-training facility. Here in Chicago, we’ve got a Morgan Stanley banker who’s doing change in their neighborhood.” Oh, I’m positive!
Tchen is quickly adopted by John Roberson, previously the metropolis of Chicago’s chief working officer and now the incoming government vp of the Obama Center. Roberson tells the viewers that “this is an $850 million investment in the South Side of Chicago. I’m going to say it again: $850 million. Not a single penny of government money. That’s important because that shows the intentionality of the President and Mrs. Obama.” It’s additionally necessary as a result of it captures a notable factor of Obama’s presidency: promising social change solely to implement financial austerity, for instance, or bailing out the large funding banks whereas many Americans’ mortgages went belly-up—and with them, the foundations of their lives. It’s somewhat like the wall downstairs, largely out of sight, the place the Obama Foundation’s workplaces are positioned, which lists the names of all the employees whose labor constructed the undertaking: a hole paean to the working class, at the same time as the heart itself and the real-estate hypothesis round it forces such employees out of their properties. More than hope and alter, irony is the order of the day at the Obama Center.
Earlier, two beleaguered-looking figures took the stage, one tall and lanky, the different diminutive however higher dressed compared. They have been Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the husband-and-wife founders of the structure agency TWBTA, who gained the fee to design the Obama Presidential Center in 2016. (To offer you some perspective, the competitors winners have been introduced proper after I graduated from school, and as I write this, I’m 32 years previous.)
As far as giant initiatives go, TWBTA was an fascinating alternative by the former president, who was intimately concerned in the design course of from starting to finish. At the time of their choice, Williams and Tsien have been in competitors with some of the most well-known architects in the world, together with Renzo Piano, whose Whitney Museum of American Art had simply opened in Greenwich Village, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who had simply begun development on the Shed at Hudson Yards.
TWBTA is finest recognized for the in depth use of stone and different masonry, dramatic transitions in lighting, and areas that really feel intimate and handcrafted. (Seemingly in distinction, the interiors agency has designed boast lots of patterns and colours, as seen in its lobbies and atria at David Geffen Hall.) While TWBTA wasn’t a family title, its small-to-medium-scale museum work, reminiscent of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the former Folk Art Museum in New York, was properly regarded in architectural circles. As far as architects go, it was a really Obama alternative: The agency signaled erudition and class whereas nonetheless being well-known sufficient to generate buzz.
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However, like ma-ny different structure companies at the moment, TWBTA has a tough time scaling up. This is sort of embarrassingly apparent on the subject of the varied buildings that make up the Obama Center. Instead of a single constructing, the heart is known as a sprawling campus. There’s the aforementioned Forum, the public-library department, the Home Court (designed by a special architect), and the playground, in addition to the towering, nearly tomb-like museum—practically windowless and clad from prime to backside in New Hampshire granite—which has been variously known as by detractors “the Obamalisk” and “the Death Star.”
When a member of the press requested Williams about the criticism of the constructing’s design and its Star Wars–like qualities, he stated that the museum was constructed for longevity and that public opinion typically modifications over time. An Obama Center official then interjected to say that Mark Hamill himself had come to tour the tower with Obama.
Offering their very own architectural tour of the heart, Williams and Tsien stood awkwardly in entrance of a presentation and tried to clarify their course of and decisions. Lots of architectural communication is bullshit, however the bullshit is commonly revealing. As for what impressed the form of the constructing, the architects say that it was “designed to look like four hands coming together.” The actual quantity of fingers that have been concerned in the design, and whose fingers they have been, was not made clear—however the extent of Obama’s involvement actually was, as the architectsmentioned that the president needed the constructing “to be interesting from all vantage points.” This explains some of the extra baffling design choices, reminiscent of the seemingly arbitrary articulations on the floor of the façade on the southeast nook. At the reverse nook from these ridges is the textual content from Obama’s speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Selma. It’s straightforward to joke that the phrases are just about illegible besides, maybe, by drone, which is doubly ironic—not solely as a result of it brings to thoughts Obama’s penchant for utilizing drones to stealth-bomb Afghan weddings but additionally the use of drones by real- property folks to showcase their properties’ scale and price.
Much as with Obama’s presidency itself, as one excursions the Obama Center, one realizes that the liberal language of group and social justice has typically served as a canopy for financial disruption and an intense battle to denationalise that which for a century has belonged to the public. The heart sits on an unlimited space of Jackson Park, initially designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, which—regardless of a authorized battle by the nonprofit group Protect Our Parks that was ongoing for nearly 10 years earlier than the newest lawsuit was dismissed in 2024—the Obama Foundation has basically made its personal by securing a long-term lease from the metropolis in an effort to construct on it. During the heart’s development, the basis made its possession of this public park clear by eradicating swaths of bushes, whose absence makes the plaza and the playground nearly unbearably sizzling in the summer season.
Like many large-scale ventures in actual property, the Obama Center has additionally not helped the group through which it was constructed. As it approached completion, rents in the neighboring communities of Woodlawn and South Shore started to skyrocket, with many residents being priced out of models they’d lived in for years and even many years. To assist residents put together for the onslaught of vacationers, the pleasant people at Airbnb have partnered with the Obama Foundation to “host a free virtual workshop focused on helping local residents welcome new visitors, earn supplemental income, and champion their neighborhoods…building off of Airbnb’s historic donations to community organizations focused on boosting economic empowerment.” According to Airbnb’s statistics, South Side residents earned greater than $15.1 million from internet hosting guests by means of Airbnb in 2025—“income,” the firm tells us, “that approximately 60 percent of hosts say helped them stay in their homes and manage the city’s rising cost of living.” Economic empowerment, certainly.
The Obama Center will not be a presidential library, although many of the occasion’s audio system engaged in the parapraxis of calling it that. A spokesperson instructed me that as a result of Obama’s was the first digital presidency, there was no need for a paper path. Technically, the library portion is held at the National Archives in Washington, DC. For all the current outrage about Donald Trump’s commissioning a presidential library that’s truly a lodge, the precedent has been set by his predecessor, who has constructed for himself a sort of advanced, a lot of which apologizes for itself.
The heart’s eight-story museum is so clearly a vacationer vacation spot that the concept that the relaxation of the grounds are for native folks is pretty laughable. Allegedly, the lawns and gardens are there to function a entrance garden for the group, though not like an precise park, the monumental website, the impeccable landscaping, and the phone-scrolling rent-a-cops just about inhibit this outright. Beyond that, timed passes for the museum have been reserved by means of subsequent yr, so we should see how the battle between the specific restriction of flows of folks and the purported perform of public area play out.
Intended for the local people or not, the campus sprawls throughout Stony Island Avenue, the place the Main Court—the former president’s NBA-regulation basketball court docket—resides with the aluminum-paneled hulkiness of a school cafeteria. (It was designed by the agency Moody Nolan, whose Chicago workplace is led by the native architect Renauld Deandre Mitchell.) The playground, which is the most public-facing and fascinating half of the heart, suffers from being uncovered to direct solar however is in any other case very candy, with tall, fast-moving slides and jungle gyms formed like dragonflies. The panorama structure, particularly the inexperienced roof of the Forum and the parking storage, is extra delicate than the stone palazzo, full with an unsettling, hollow-eyed bronze statue of Mr. and Mrs. Obama holding fingers, that anchors the three buildings by TWBTA. It jogs my memory of the REACH, Steven Holl’s addendum to the Kennedy Center, which is extra visually dynamic and higher built-in into the website. It’s additionally price saying that the two smaller buildings—the ones Obama seemed to be considerably much less concerned with—aren’t unhandsome. The scale of the Forum and the new department of the Chicago Public Library are each grand and intimate, and the stonework—made of the similar granite as the museum—is, on this context, tactile. TWBTA’s interiors for the library (which features a studying room of Obama’s favourite books) are likewise shiny and fascinating.
The two smaller buildings, nonetheless, aren’t the major draw of the Obama Center. That can be, of course, the towering museum, which is totally out of proportion to the relaxation of its setting. Visually, it’s extra in communication with the University of Chicago than with the relaxation of the South Side. In addition to its inappropriate scale, there’s the inappropriate scale of the granite slabs that clad the constructing. They are each too large so as to add texture and they’re too small to create the desired, monumental impact that the constructing is a singular cast-in-one quantity. Combine the outsize scale with the constructing’s form, which is considerably akin to a brutalist Himalayan salt lamp, and one actually will get a way of how mistaken the complete entity is: a large and ugly pillar whose awkwardness is barely additional amplified by the practically indecipherable textual content and different stuck-on accoutrements.
When one enters the museum, it nearly seems like a joke: The entryway is hostile—one is met with shiny lights, safety guards, and steel detectors, on the different facet of which is the phrase HOPE in the script of a ransom be aware affixed to a concrete wall. After choosing up an Obama audio information, one is confronted by a collection of complicated atria that characteristic large-scale works of public artwork and sculptural stairs and corridors that lead nowhere. It takes some time to seek out the precise passageway into the museum itself: a claustrophobic escalator cornered towards the north-facing wall of the constructing. Fredric Jameson as soon as remarked about John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel that even in structure, late capitalism works tirelessly to hide, summary, and obfuscate flows of capital and other people, and the Obama Center is probably as exemplary of this phenomenon as Portman’s precipitous, topsy-turvy lobbies have been. The escalators flip into elevators, and the elevators have unusual and personal stops—to get again down from the prime flooring, one must take a separate, a lot bigger elevator than the one they took going up.
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When one lastly arrives on the first flooring of the museum’s exhibition area, they’re greeted by a replica of the Declaration of Independence alongside Native American petitions in a glass case. There are additionally a handful of small shows that embrace artifacts from many US civil-rights struggles: the abolition motion, girls’s suffrage, the combat towards Jim Crow, union activism, and the social packages established throughout the Great Society period. And that’s about the place all of the precise historical past in the museum stops. These shows and a backlit collage of objects from the ’60s exist merely as a backdrop for the major occasion: Barack Obama is born.
It is difficult to explain simply how a lot this museum is a temple to Obama. While many presidential facilities have exhibitions lauding their topics’ successes, in addition they have a tendency to not equivocate on their less-successful insurance policies. For instance, the mausoleum-like Lyndon B. Johnson Library makes positive everybody is aware of that he fucked up in Vietnam. There is not any such honest play at the Obama Center, nonetheless, which is all about celebration. Obama’s voice booms on each flooring. Videos abound of him speaking about how the Nineties have been a time of alternative. The partitions are lined in the cautious documentation of his achievements; “hope and change” is baked into the construction.
The first flooring of the exhibition is the most fascinating, as a result of it covers the time when Obama was most fascinating: when he was a group organizer on the South Side, when he was a state senator for Illinois, and of course the 2008 election, which was a genuinely monumental achievement. When I used to be 14, I attended Obama’s 2009 inauguration on a faculty journey and keep in mind it very properly—the freezing chilly, the voice projecting over the jumbotron, the celebrations in the streets. The speech he gave was one of the few occasions in my life once I thought of myself unabashedly proud to be an American. But what follows on the subsequent two flooring of the museum exhibition is more and more ludicrous. The second flooring tells us all about how Obama solved the Great Recession—ignoring the undeniable fact that he bailed out the banks and General Motors and left everybody else behind. Then there’s a piece on his international coverage, with titles like “Strengthening Alliances” and “Destroying Terrorist Networks.” “To destroy the terrorist groups al Qaeda and [ISIL] President Obama used every element of US power. This included the military, intelligence, diplomacy, homeland security, and a commitment to the rule of law and human rights.” This, regardless of the undeniable fact that the rule of regulation was significantly undermined by Obama’s growth of digital surveillance and that human rights now not utilized to the many civilians who have been collateral harm in the United States’ focused strikes.
While there’s a wall and video show dedicated to LGBTQ folks in the navy, the matter of homosexual rights, which have been vastly expanded beneath Obama, is much less distinguished. On one of the partitions, we get yet one more checklist of Obama’s achievements: the Paris Climate Accords, the Affordable Care Act, restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba. But we get little or no on how his continued growth of the energy of the government department ensured that Trump may—and would—undo practically all of these.
In a studying nook for kids that seems like an afterthought, one will be taught necessary ideas of democracy, nearly all of which ring hole, whereas an iPad lets guests view “memes” (i.e., political cartoons) from historical past. Banned books lie behind lift-a-flaps. Several shows ask the viewer: “How would you respond?” A typical query goes one thing like: “Some Americans question whether freedom is granted equally—or whether certain rights should be guaranteed. If you heard: ‘My rights don’t mean as much as a rich person’s do—I can’t afford to buy a giant billboard or a bunch of ads as part of my free speech,’ how would you respond?” The right reply is, of course, placation—your rights do matter. (Even although the query is telling the uncomfortable reality.) Another insipid show options three wells of mild shining on three buttons and the query “In a 2023 poll, just 28% of Americans said they were satisfied with how our democracy is functioning. What should we do about it?” Visitors can vote for (a) “Continue to make change while upholding democracy”; (b) “Throw democracy out and start over with a new system”; or (c) “I don’t care.” It’s fairly clear at this level that we now not reside in a professional democracy of any form, and but we’re compelled to faux in any other case. As is the case with the relaxation of the museum, the current—the right here and now, the political world we presently inhabit—merely doesn’t exist. The nostalgia for the second earlier than the catastrophe and the refusal to reckon with what has truly occurred since then is so palpable that at occasions it borders on delusion. At the Obama Center, one walks into 2008 and by no means leaves. “Hope and change” doesn’t disappoint, and as such it turns into little greater than a model or, maybe worse, simply one thing one can say with out that means it. Hope has a everlasting dwelling, as Jarrett put it. It is a tomb.
But maybe what’s most ridiculous about the Obama Center museum is the movie star of all of it. The prime flooring of the exhibition encompasses a quantity of completely asinine shows: little dioramas of events at the White House; a bust of the man himself; a comic book strip about the Obamas’ canines; a show of Michelle’s attire; one other dedicated to the varied species named after the former president. Many presidential libraries have a full-scale duplicate of the Oval Office because it was inhabited by their namesake. In the selfie age, this has extra of a photo-booth really feel than a historic factor to it. By the time one takes the elevator to the statement deck, they’re starting to really feel drowsy with Obama fatigue. Finally, we’ve got escaped—if solely we may muster the power to take pleasure in the view.
Somehow, the statement deck additionally has its flaws. An enclosed room at the prime of the constructing, it has a ceiling set up consisting of a pyramid from which little blue rays of textual content from Obama’s Selma speech emanate. It feels overwhelmingly flat in a room that, with its stonework, textured wooden partitions, and gargantuan letters, is in any other case dynamic and tactile. The textual content that interrupts the view is probably one of the few fascinating design decisions in the total constructing—one desires to achieve out and seize the beveled letters. But sadly, when you’ve had your fill of this characteristic, you then make your approach again into the nostalgic world of Obama adulation, taking the elevator all the way down to the floor flooring of the Forum, the place you’ll be greeted by an expansive Obama-themed reward store.
After I left the heart, I started interested by what it means as a bit of structure. For me, it features as a sort of cenotaph for neoliberalism: a monument—or tomb—for a topic whose physique is misplaced or buried elsewhere. The most well-known cenotaph in structure was the one proposed for Isaac Newton, designed in 1784 by the French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée however by no means constructed: It consisted of a single, big, vacuous sphere. And whereas artifacts and objects technically exist in the Obamalisk, it’s spiritually vacuous, its substance is the empty world that Obama’s presidency by no means truly constructed. It is a tomb and not using a physique—anybody’s physique.
One can not deny that the Obama Center may have a particular place in the architectural canon, not as a result of it’s good however as a result of it’s arguably the final constructing of the 2010s—itself an extension of the Nineties and 2000s—constructed half a decade too late. The mannequin of manufacturing for civic buildings—museums, libraries, live performance halls, and so on.—by well-known architects, reliant on each large-scale non-public (and generally public) funding and enormous swaths of low cost, developable city land, is over. The architects accountable—giants of their discipline—are dying, and each the operations of their companies and the scale of their initiatives are far much less economically viable at a time when land is extraordinarily costly and governments are turning away from civic structure. The buildings of this now-bygone period, reminiscent of the Whitney, the Shed, and the Paris and Hamburg philharmonic halls, are ostensibly “public-facing” whereas producing rents of a special form—those who the Brazilian architectural theorist Pedro Fiori Arantes calls the “rent of form”: They generate profits by means of the elevated worth of the surrounding actual property, as websites for promoting and photograph shoots, and as venues for the tourism trade, which has come to displace many others.
For higher and for worse, this strategy to structure now not exists, at the same time as the Obama Presidential Center presents us one final homage to its ambition and optimism. In this fashion, maybe the most tragic factor of the heart is simply how far it ended up being from its personal declared function, which is to foster hope and the inspiration to impact change in the hearts of its guests. Instead, hope and change exist solely in the previous tense, although I suppose you should buy them on a water bottle in the reward store.
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