{"id":823,"date":"2026-08-11T18:43:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T18:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=823"},"modified":"2026-08-11T18:43:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T18:43:58","slug":"the-nostalgic-architecture-of-the-obama-presidential-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=823","title":{"rendered":"The Nostalgic Architecture of the Obama Presidential Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cHope now has a permanent home,\u201d Obama Foundation CEO and former senior adviser to the president Valerie Jarrett tells an audience of about three dozen reporters in a small auditorium designed for intimate, terraced seating. We are in part of what\u2019s called the Forum, a section of the Obama Presidential Center that is open to the public. Just beyond these walls is a restaurant where one can buy an Obama Burger, and just beyond that is the Fannie Lou Hamer Walkway, sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, which provides passage to the Nancy Pelosi Garden Pavilion, placed right beside the car park, perhaps an homage to how long the former speaker held her seat in Congress. Farther afield is the rest of the center, which includes a museum, offices for the Obama Foundation, several basketball courts, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, and a playground.<\/p>\n

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Tina Tchen is here to announce the foundation\u2019s new leadership initiatives, which are about as revealing as the perfunctory placards and memorializations of \u201chope\u201d and \u201cchange\u201d all around us. These include a mid-career program for \u201cthe next generation of leaders\u201d\u2014not only \u201cNGO leaders,\u201d we are told, but\u201cfolks who are military leaders, who are in government, who are in business, big and small, who are in academia.\u201d Among the participants, Jarrett continues, \u201cwe have a young man who is currently the deputy mayor for sustainability in the city of London. We have Emmanuel Macron\u2019s 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\u2019ve got a Morgan Stanley banker who\u2019s doing change in their neighborhood.\u201d Oh, I\u2019m sure!<\/p>\n

Tchen is soon followed by John Roberson, formerly the city of Chicago\u2019s chief operating officer \ufeffand now the incoming executive vice president of the Obama Center. Roberson tells the audience that \u201cthis is an $850 million investment in the South Side of Chicago. I\u2019m going to say it again: $850 million. Not a single penny of government money. That\u2019s important because that shows the intentionality of the President and Mrs. Obama.\u201d It\u2019s also important because it captures a notable element of Obama\u2019s presidency: promising social change only to implement economic austerity, for example, or bailing out the big investment banks while many Americans\u2019 mortgages went belly-up\u2014and with them, the foundations of their lives. It\u2019s rather like the wall downstairs, largely out of sight, where the Obama Foundation\u2019s offices are located, which lists the names of all the workers whose labor built the project: a hollow paean to the working class, even as the center itself and the real-estate speculation around it forces such workers out of their homes. More than hope and change, irony is the order of the day at the Obama Center.<\/p>\n

Earlier, two beleaguered-looking figures took the stage, one tall and lanky, the other diminutive but better dressed in comparison. They were Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the husband-and-wife founders of the architecture firm TWBTA, who won the commission to design the Obama Presidential Center in 2016. (To give you some perspective, the competition winners were announced right after I graduated from college, and as I write this, I am 32 years old.)<\/p>\n

As far as large projects go, TWBTA was an interesting choice by the former president, who was intimately involved in the design process from beginning to end. At the time of their selection, Williams and Tsien were in competition with some of the most famous architects in the world, including Renzo Piano, whose Whitney Museum of American Art had just opened in Greenwich Village, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who had just begun construction on the Shed at Hudson Yards.<\/p>\n

TWBTA is best known for the extensive use of stone and other masonry, dramatic transitions in lighting, and spaces that feel intimate and handcrafted. (Seemingly in contrast, the interiors firm has designed boast a lot of patterns and colors, as seen in its lobbies and atria at David Geffen Hall.) While TWBTA wasn\u2019t a household name, its small-to-medium-scale museum work, such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the former Folk Art Museum in New York, was well regarded in architectural circles. As far as architects go, it was a very Obama choice: The firm signaled erudition and sophistication while still being well-known enough to generate buzz.<\/p>\n

However, like ma-ny other architecture firms today, TWBTA has a hard time scaling up. This is almost embarrassingly obvious when it comes to the various structures that make up the Obama Center. Instead of a single building, the center is really a sprawling campus. There\u2019s the aforementioned Forum, the public-library branch, the Home Court (designed by a different architect), and the playground, as well as the towering, almost tomb-like museum\u2014nearly windowless and clad from top to bottom in New Hampshire granite\u2014which has been variously called by detractors \u201cthe Obamalisk\u201d and \u201cthe Death Star.\u201d<\/p>\n

When a member of the press asked Williams about the criticism of the building\u2019s design and its Star Wars<\/em>\u2013like qualities, he said that the museum was built for longevity and that public opinion often changes over time. An Obama Center official then interjected to say that Mark Hamill himself had come to tour the tower with Obama.<\/p>\n

Offering their own architectural tour of the center, Williams and Tsien stood awkwardly in front of a presentation and tried to explain their process and choices. A lot of architectural communication is bullshit, but the bullshit is often revealing. As for what inspired the shape of the building, the architects say that it was \u201cdesigned to look like four hands coming together.\u201d The exact number of hands that were involved in the design, and whose hands they were, was not made clear\u2014but the extent of Obama\u2019s involvement certainly was, as the architectsmentioned that the president wanted the building \u201cto be interesting from all vantage points.\u201d This explains some of the more baffling design decisions, such as the seemingly arbitrary articulations on the surface of the fa\u00e7ade on the southeast corner. At the opposite corner from these ridges is the text from Obama\u2019s speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma. It\u2019s easy to joke that the words are pretty much illegible except, perhaps, by drone, which is doubly ironic\u2014not only because it brings to mind Obama\u2019s penchant for using drones to stealth-bomb Afghan weddings but also the use of drones by real- estate people to showcase their properties\u2019 scale and worth.<\/p>\n

Much as with Obama\u2019s presidency itself, as one tours the Obama Center, one realizes that the liberal language of community and social justice has often served as a cover for economic disruption and an intense battle to privatize that which for a century has belonged to the public. The center sits on a vast area of Jackson Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, which\u2014despite a legal battle by the nonprofit group Protect Our Parks that was ongoing for almost 10 years before the latest lawsuit was dismissed in 2024\u2014the Obama Foundation has essentially made its own by securing a long-term lease from the city in order to build on it. During the center\u2019s construction, the foundation made its possession of this public park clear by removing swaths of trees, whose absence makes the plaza and the playground almost unbearably hot in the summer.<\/p>\n

Like many large-scale ventures in real estate, the Obama Center has also not helped the community in which it was built. As it approached completion, rents in the neighboring communities of Woodlawn and South Shore began to skyrocket, with many residents being priced out of units they\u2019d lived in for years or even decades. To help residents prepare for the onslaught of tourists, the friendly folks at Airbnb have partnered with the Obama Foundation to \u201chost a free virtual workshop focused on helping local residents welcome new visitors, earn supplemental income, and champion their neighborhoods\u2026building off of Airbnb\u2019s historic donations to community organizations focused on boosting economic empowerment.\u201d According to Airbnb\u2019s statistics, South Side residents earned more than $15.1 million from hosting visitors through Airbnb in 2025\u2014\u201cincome,\u201d the company tells us, \u201cthat approximately 60 percent of hosts say helped them stay in their homes and manage the city\u2019s rising cost of living.\u201d Economic empowerment, indeed.<\/p>\n

The Obama Center is not a presidential library, though many of the event\u2019s speakers engaged in the parapraxis of calling it that. A spokesperson told me that because Obama\u2019s was the first digital presidency, there was little need for a paper trail. Technically, the library portion is held at the National Archives in Washington, DC. For all the recent outrage about Donald Trump\u2019s commissioning a presidential library that\u2019s actually a hotel, the precedent has been set by his predecessor, who has built for himself a kind of complex, much of which apologizes for itself.<\/p>\n

The center\u2019s eight-story museum is so obviously a tourist destination that the idea that the rest of the grounds are for local people is fairly laughable. Allegedly, the lawns and gardens are there to serve as a front lawn for the community, although unlike an actual park, the monumental site, the impeccable landscaping, and the phone-scrolling rent-a-cops pretty much inhibit this outright. Beyond that, timed passes for the museum have been reserved through next year, so we will have to see how the conflict between the explicit restriction of flows of people and the purported function of public space play out.<\/p>\n

Intended for the local community or not, the campus sprawls across Stony Island Avenue, where the Main Court\u2014the former president\u2019s NBA-regulation basketball court\u2014resides with the aluminum-paneled hulkiness of a college cafeteria. (It was designed by the firm Moody Nolan, whose Chicago office is led by the local architect Renauld Deandre Mitchell.) The playground, which is the most public-facing and engaging part of the center, suffers from being exposed to direct sun but is otherwise very sweet, with tall, fast-moving slides and jungle gyms shaped like dragonflies. The landscape architecture, especially the green roof of the Forum and the parking garage, is more sensitive than the stone palazzo, complete with an unsettling, hollow-eyed bronze statue of Mr. and Mrs. Obama holding hands, that anchors the three buildings by TWBTA. It reminds me of the REACH, Steven Holl\u2019s addendum to the Kennedy Center, which is more visually dynamic and better integrated into the site. It\u2019s also worth saying that the two smaller buildings\u2014the ones Obama appeared to be significantly less involved with\u2014are not unhandsome. The scale of the Forum and the new branch of the Chicago Public Library are both grand and intimate, and the stonework\u2014made of the same granite as the museum\u2014is, in this context, tactile. TWBTA\u2019s interiors for the library (which includes a reading room of Obama\u2019s favorite books) are likewise bright and engaging.<\/p>\n

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The two smaller buildings, however, are not the main draw of the Obama Center. That would be, of course, the towering museum, which is completely out of proportion to the rest of its environment. Visually, it is more in communication with the University of Chicago than with the rest of the South Side. In addition to its inappropriate scale, there is the inappropriate scale of the granite slabs that clad the building. They are both too big to add texture and they are too small to create the desired, monumental effect that the building is a singular cast-in-one volume. Combine the outsize scale with the building\u2019s shape, which is somewhat akin to a brutalist Himalayan salt lamp, and one really gets a sense of how mistaken the whole entity is: a massive and unsightly pillar whose awkwardness is only further amplified by the nearly indecipherable text and other stuck-on accoutrements.<\/p>\n

When one enters the museum, it almost feels like a joke: The entryway is hostile\u2014one is met with bright lights, security guards, and metal detectors, on the other side of which is the word HOPE<\/em> in the script of a ransom note affixed to a concrete wall. After picking up an Obama audio guide, one is confronted by a series of confusing atria\ufeff that feature large-scale works of public art and sculptural stairs and corridors that lead nowhere. It takes a while to find the actual passageway into the museum itself: a claustrophobic escalator cornered against the north-facing wall of the building. Fredric Jameson once remarked about John Portman\u2019s Westin Bonaventure Hotel that even in architecture, late capitalism works tirelessly to conceal, abstract, and obfuscate flows of capital and people, and the Obama Center is perhaps as exemplary of this phenomenon as Portman\u2019s precipitous, topsy-turvy lobbies were. The escalators turn into elevators, and the elevators have strange and private stops\u2014to get back down from the top floor, one needs to take a separate, much larger elevator than the one they took going up.<\/p>\n

When one finally arrives on the first floor of the museum\u2019s exhibition space, they are greeted by a copy of the Declaration of Independence alongside Native American petitions in a glass case. There are also a handful of small displays that include artifacts from many US civil-rights struggles: the abolition movement, women\u2019s suffrage, the fight against Jim Crow, union activism, and the social programs established during the Great Society era. And that\u2019s about where all of the actual history in the museum stops. These displays and a backlit collage of objects from the \u201960s exist merely as a backdrop for the main event: Barack Obama is born.<\/p>\n

It is hard to describe just how much this museum is a temple to Obama. While many presidential centers have exhibitions lauding their subjects\u2019 successes, they also tend not to equivocate on their less-successful policies. For example, the mausoleum-like Lyndon B. Johnson Library makes sure everyone knows that he fucked up in Vietnam. There is no such fair play at the Obama Center, however, which is all about celebration. Obama\u2019s voice booms on every floor. Videos abound of him talking about how the 1990s were a time of opportunity. The walls are covered in the careful documentation of his achievements; \u201chope and change\u201d is baked into the structure.<\/p>\n

The first floor of the exhibition is the most interesting, because it covers the time when Obama was most interesting: when he was a community 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 was 14, I attended Obama\u2019s 2009 inauguration on a school trip and remember it very well\u2014the freezing cold, the voice projecting over the jumbotron, the celebrations in the streets. The speech he gave was one of the few times in my life when I considered myself unabashedly proud to be an American. But what follows on the next two floors of the museum exhibition is increasingly ludicrous. The second floor tells us all about how Obama solved the Great Recession\u2014ignoring the fact that he bailed out the banks and General Motors and left everyone else behind. Then there\u2019s a section on his foreign policy, with titles like \u201cStrengthening Alliances\u201d and \u201cDestroying Terrorist Networks.\u201d \u201cTo 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.\u201d This, despite the fact that the rule of law was seriously undermined by Obama\u2019s expansion of digital surveillance and that human rights no longer applied to the many civilians who were collateral damage in the United States\u2019 targeted strikes.<\/p>\n

While there\u2019s a wall and video display devoted to LGBTQ people in the military, the topic of gay rights, which were greatly expanded under Obama, is less prominent. On one of the walls, we get yet another list of Obama\u2019s achievements: the Paris Climate Accords, the Affordable Care Act, restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba. But we get very little on how his continued expansion of the power of the executive branch ensured that Trump could\u2014and would\u2014undo nearly all of these.<\/p>\n

In a learning corner for children that feels like an afterthought, one can be taught important concepts of democracy, almost all of which ring hollow, while an iPad lets visitors view \u201cmemes\u201d (i.e., political cartoons) from history. Banned books lie behind lift-a-flaps. Several displays ask the viewer: \u201cHow would you respond?\u201d A typical question goes something like: \u201cSome Americans question whether freedom is granted equally\u2014or whether certain rights should be guaranteed. If you heard: \u2018My rights don\u2019t mean as much as a rich person\u2019s do\u2014I can\u2019t afford to buy a giant billboard or a bunch of ads as part of my free speech,\u2019 how would you respond?\u201d The correct answer is, of course, placation\u2014your rights do<\/em> matter. (Even though the question is telling the uncomfortable truth.) Another insipid display features three wells of light shining on three buttons and the question \u201cIn a 2023 poll, just 28% of Americans said they were satisfied with how our democracy is functioning. What should we do about it?\u201d Visitors can vote for (a) \u201cContinue to make change while upholding democracy\u201d; (b) \u201cThrow democracy out and start over with a new system\u201d; or (c) \u201cI don\u2019t care.\u201d It\u2019s pretty clear at this point that we no longer live in a legitimate democracy of any kind, and yet we are forced to pretend otherwise. As is the case with the rest of the museum, the present\u2014the here and now, the political world we currently inhabit\u2014simply doesn\u2019t exist. The nostalgia for the moment before the disaster and the refusal to reckon with what has actually happened since then is so palpable that at times it borders on delusion. At the Obama Center, one walks into 2008 and never leaves. \u201cHope and change\u201d doesn\u2019t disappoint, and as such it becomes little more than a brand or, perhaps worse, just something one can say without meaning it. Hope has a permanent home, as Jarrett put it. It is a tomb.<\/p>\n

But perhaps what is most ridiculous about the Obama Center museum is the celebrity of it all. The top floor of the exhibition features a number of absolutely asinine displays: little dioramas of parties at the White House; a bust of the man himself; a comic strip about the Obamas\u2019 dogs; a display of Michelle\u2019s dresses; another devoted to the various species named after the former president. Many presidential libraries have a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as it was inhabited by their namesake. In the selfie age, this has more of a photo-booth feel than a historical element to it. By the time one takes the elevator to the observation deck, they\u2019re beginning to feel drowsy with Obama fatigue. Finally, we have escaped\u2014if only we could muster the energy to enjoy the view.<\/p>\n

Somehow, the observation deck also has its flaws. An enclosed room at the top of the building, it has a ceiling installation consisting of a pyramid from which little blue rays of text from Obama\u2019s Selma speech emanate. It feels overwhelmingly flat in a room that, with its stonework, textured wood walls, and gargantuan letters, is otherwise dynamic and tactile. The text that interrupts the view is perhaps one of the few interesting design choices in the entire building\u2014one wants to reach out and grab the beveled letters. But unfortunately, once you\u2019ve had your fill of this feature, you then make your way back into the nostalgic world of Obama adulation, taking the elevator down to the ground floor of the Forum, where you\u2019ll be greeted by an expansive Obama-themed gift shop.<\/p>\n

After I left the center, I began thinking about what it means as a piece of architecture. For me, it functions as a kind of cenotaph for neoliberalism: a monument\u2014or tomb\u2014for a subject whose body is lost or buried elsewhere. The most famous cenotaph in architecture was the one proposed for Isaac Newton, designed in 1784 by the French neoclassical architect \u00c9tienne-Louis Boull\u00e9e but never built: It consisted of a single, giant, vacuous sphere. And while artifacts and objects technically exist in the Obamalisk, it is spiritually vacuous, its substance is the empty world that Obama\u2019s presidency never actually built. It is a tomb without a body\u2014anyone\u2019s body.<\/p>\n

One cannot deny that the Obama Center will have a special place in the architectural canon, not because it\u2019s good but because it is arguably the last building of the 2010s\u2014itself an extension of the 1990s and 2000s\u2014built half a decade too late. The model of production for civic buildings\u2014museums, libraries, concert halls, etc.\u2014by famous architects, reliant on both large-scale private (and sometimes public) funding and large swaths of cheap, developable urban land, is over. The architects responsible\u2014giants of their field\u2014are dying, and both the operations of their firms and the scale of their projects are far less economically viable at a time when land is extremely expensive and governments are turning away from civic architecture. The buildings of this now-bygone era, such as the Whitney, the Shed, and the Paris and Hamburg philharmonic halls, are ostensibly \u201cpublic-facing\u201d while generating rents of a different kind\u2014those that the Brazilian architectural theorist Pedro Fiori Arantes calls the \u201crent of form\u201d: They make money through the increased value of the surrounding real estate, as sites for advertising and photo shoots, and as venues for the tourism industry, which has come to displace many others.<\/p>\n

For better and for worse, this approach to architecture no longer exists, even as the Obama Presidential Center offers us one last homage to its ambition and optimism. In this way, perhaps the most tragic element of the center is just how far it ended up being from its own declared purpose, which is to foster hope and the inspiration to effect change in the hearts of its visitors. Instead, hope<\/em> and change<\/em> exist only in the past tense, though I guess you can buy them on a water bottle in the gift shop.<\/p>\n

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