People generally have one question for architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien when they find out the duo designed the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago: How involved was the 44th president in the project?
‘We joke that Barack was one of those clients that comes in and says, ‘If I weren’t a ______, I’d be an architect.’ Which is always a little problematic when you are an architect,” laughs Tsien
President Barack Obama outside the Tod Williams Bill Tsien Architects-designed tower on the campus.
In fact, the former president has spoken several times about architecture as a youthful ambition. No surprise then, “[His] was a very dynamic and very interesting involvement,’ Tsien says.
The engagement of both the former President and First Lady Michelle Obama is evident throughout the site, which formally opens on Juneteenth (19 June, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the US), nearly a decade after Williams and Tsien won a competition to design the centre. Barack pushed for boldness, at one point invoking Constantin Brancusi; Michelle kept returning to the word ‘fun.’
From the outset, the architects, who were awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2013, framed the project around the values of ennobling and enabling. The first represented a landmark worthy of the nation’s first Black president; the second reflected Barack’s years empowering residents as a community organiser on Chicago’s South Side.
The tower is crowned with a text installation, depicting excerpts from one of President Obama's speeches, that was designed in collaboration with Pentagram.
The campus sits within Chicago's historic Jackson park
'We’ve always thought very much about not trying to just make a building, but trying to make a place.'
Billie Tsien, Architect
‘We’ve always thought very much about not trying to just make a building, but trying to make a place,’ says Tsien. That place now unfolds within Jackson Park, the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed landscape that once hosted the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
A view of a lush garden, designed by MVVA.
The campus includes places to play and relax, including barbecue pits and playgrounds.
The surprise of the 19.3-acre campus is how little it feels like a monument. Instead, it reads as a series of spaces for everyday life, with small surprises throughout. While the 225-foot museum tower is the most recognisable image, an argument could be made that the real story happens at ground level: a forum, a Chicago Public Library branch, a 21,000 sq ft playground, gardens, beehives, a picnic area (complete with grills, per Barack’s request) and a regulation basketball court (in a separate building designed by Moody Nolan), all woven into a landscape by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). With the exception of the museum, everything is free and open to the public.
The museum includes its own branch of the Chicago Public Library. In it, visitors can discover the Presidential Reading Room, which includes the Obamas' favourite books.
'Play and fun was such a big part of what the Obamas wanted,’ says MVVA principal Matthew Bird, adding ‘having spaces to gather, and a variety of spaces, was extremely important.’
Interiors were the purview of Michael S. Smith, the Los Angeles designer responsible for the Obama White House interiors, and author of Designing History: The Extraordinary Art & Style of the Obama White House. He advised on furnishings and oversaw the museum’s full-scale recreation of the Oval Office circa 2014 (where visitors can have their photo taken at President Obama’s desk).
A view into the exhibit hall
A replica of the Oval Office, as it appeared in 2014, designed by Michael S. Smith, a frequent Obama collaborator.
Art is everywhere, with more than two dozen commissioned works by artists including Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford and Nick Cave, most of which can be viewed without a ticket.
One stair is flanked by a tapestry designed by Nick Cave and Marie Watt.
An escalator glides past a towering stained glass window designed by artist Julie Mehretu.
About the tower. First: it is a museum, not a library, which explains the limited windows. The hand-made edifice is clad in what Williams describes as ‘very figured’ New Hampshire granite; other buildings on the site are clad in ‘a quieter stone.’
Visitors traverse the levels of exhibitions via escalators positioned directly next to the 83-foot-tall Mehretu stained glass piece, offering a colourful, filtered view of the city while ascending, often accompanied by music from Barack's own playlist.
Visitors reach the lofty Sky Space at the top of the museum.
Barack Obama viewing the surrounding South Side through the concrete letters in the Sky Space.
Near the top, five-foot-tall concrete letters, creating sentences drawn from Obama’s 2015 Selma speech, wrap two elevations of the building. The installation, entitled You Are America, emerged from a collaboration with Pentagram consulting partner Michael Bierut, who suggested language as an alternative to an abstract pattern. The words – in the same typeface used by the former President during his campaign and his presidency - are intentionally difficult to read to avoid feeling ‘oppressingly bombastic,’ per Bierut.
Standing in the Sky Room at the top of the museum (the architects’ favourite space), visitors find themselves enveloped by those words, while gazing out across Chicago’s South and West Sides.
The former president checks out an exhibits. He wanted the centre to be 'exactly the opposite of all presidential libraries.’
In a video posted by the Obama Foundation, Williams recalled that when the architects first met Barack, he said he wanted the centre to be ‘exactly the opposite of all presidential libraries.’ Mission accomplished.
In that same video, Barack lays out his hopes for its legacy: ‘Twenty years from now, 30 years from now, I want young people all across the South Side of Chicago, all across Chicago, all across America, to be able to look at this centre and say “this is a sign I count, and this is a sign that I can change the world."'