It is visible from almost anywhere on Chicago’s South Side, a 225-foot-tall chunky obelisk that some have nicknamed “the Obamalisk.”
The structure is the centerpiece of what will be by far the most expensive presidential center ever constructed and, like the president whose vision shaped it, it is setting off intense and often conflicting reactions.
The Obama Presidential Center is taking shape in Jackson Park, as four buildings rise around a new landscape where workers are busily rolling out sod and planting saplings along man-made hills. The goal is to finish this unusual, ambitious project by next spring.
Whether they will meet that deadline — left intentionally vague — is not a sure thing. Nor is the success of this effort to redefine the concept of a presidential library, from a quiet archive to a bustling community anchor.
The plan has courted controversy since it was announced a decade ago. Local groups protested, and filed lawsuits, over its potential impact both on their beloved Jackson Park, created by the designers of New York’s Central Park, and on what is already rampant gentrification in the area. Some historians expressed concerns that the center will not include a traditional research library and that it will be run by the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration.
As the Obama Center nears completion it remains the vision of a president who still firmly believes in his ability to buck convention, and to inspire hope and collective change. But, as with his presidency, there may be limits to how far even Barack Obama can go.
“I’m not interested in a mausoleum, and I’m not really that interested in just, you know, a celebration of my presidency,” Mr. Obama said in a Zoom interview. “I’m more interested in, how can we use this space to activate people and get them to feel inspired about making a difference in their own communities? To create a center for community life in a place that, frankly, has often been neglected.”
The center is being built on land owned by the City of Chicago under an agreement with the Obama Foundation, which pays a total of $10 for 99 years. Privately funded, it is projected to cost about $850 million. The Clinton Presidential Center and Park, in Little Rock, Ark., by contrast, cost $165 million ($288 million, adjusted for inflation), while the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas came in at $327 million ($460 million today).
A Vision for the South Side
The New York firm Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects won the competition to design the center nine years ago, based partly on a portfolio that included their transporting Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the University of Chicago’s quietly luminous Logan Center for the Arts. But what most impressed the Obamas and their team was Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien’s decision to split what other architects had conceived of as a single building into four parts, forming a campus.
Mr. Obama wants the center to be a vital, welcoming slice of urbanity occupied by people and landscapes as much as by structures. “I am a big believer in public spaces and public gatherings,” Mr. Obama said. ”I love the idea of creating spaces that make people feel more alive, more connected.”
He recalled how some of the Chicago housing projects he encountered in his early days of community organizing, like the infamous Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green, promoted just the opposite. “The architecture itself sent a message,” he said. “It dictated the separation of people.”
Making the presidential center into a campus opened up more areas for public use — some inside buildings, some between them, and some even atop them. Only the museum will require a paid ticket. Nearly a dozen other spaces — meeting rooms, classrooms, parks, an N.B.A.-size basketball court, even a branch of the Chicago Public Library — will be reserved for visitors or the activities of the foundation, and its leadership-training activities, jobs programs and more.
Mr. Obama said he wanted the center to be “a living, breathing, dynamic cultural and gathering space.”
The Obamas have deep roots here on the South Side. It’s where Michelle grew up, Barack started his career, and where the two met. So the choice to locate the center in this community, he said, was about lifting it up, showcasing its assets, and demonstrating to the world that it was worthy of significant backing.
Valerie Jarrett, a longtime Obama adviser and chief executive of the Obama Foundation, who also grew up in the area, described the project as both a “gift” and an “economic engine” for the neighborhood. A financial impact study the foundation commissioned from Deloitte estimated that the Obama Presidential Center would attract 625,000 to 760,000 visitors annually.
A Weighty Symbol
The eight-story museum is an irregular monolith clad in blond New Hampshire granite. Inside, across four floors, it will chronicle Mr. Obama’s presidency through films, installations, a replica of the Oval Office, miniature scenes of White House events and a collection of the first lady’s dresses. There is also a “Sky Room,” a glowing, pyramid-topped observation deck offering vistas of the neighborhood.
The building’s form was inspired by the idea of four hands joining together, reaching skyward. Stare long enough at the structure and the angles along its flanks start to resemble knuckles, with fingers stretching up.
Mr. Obama has been an aficionado of architecture since childhood — “Somehow I took a wrong turn and got into politics,” he said jokingly — and he was not hesitant to lend his input, sharing rough sketches with the designers. “I’m sure there were times when I got on their nerves a little bit.”
During the push and pull between the president and the architects, Mr. Obama asked for the building to be taller — it eventually grew by 45 feet — but not too “imposing.” To temper the scale, he suggested animating the mostly windowless facade with texture. You can see the results: long lines etched into a facade, tilted cuts on some corners; a tall, narrow window that will glow from within.
“Many times we quietly, or not so quietly, criticized the foundation for being chaotic or the president for changing his mind and stuff like that,” Mr. Williams said. But he said the process ultimately made the project better.
Large art installations will animate the tower, including an 83-foot-tall abstract glass work by Julie Mehretu already in place — a collage of warm colors and images drawn from African and American history and art history. (Mr. Williams calls it the center’s rose window.)
Marking the upper levels will be a multistory installation composed of five-foot-tall concrete words from Mr. Obama’s speech on the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. More than 25 artists, including Maya Lin, Kiki Smith, Nick Cave and Richard Hunt, will have paintings, sculptures, murals and other artworks around the site.
A Public Library and a Basketball Court
But if the museum is the center’s most visible piece, the community-minded spaces are its heart.
The Obama team set out its public goals from the start but the vision gained clarity in 2017, when they elected to digitize the president’s records instead of housing them on site, as other presidential centers had done. (The physical records will be stored elsewhere by the National Archives.) That move promised to make the holdings more widely available and to free up space at the center. But some scholars worry that without a dedicated repository, original records could be scattered. Having a museum run by a private foundation, they said, could deal a blow to the idea of nonpartisan presidential history.
Hugging a granite-floored central courtyard is the Forum, a long, low space with a 299-seat auditorium, two studios for visitors to record music and podcasts, classrooms, a cafe and the foundation’s offices.
At the end of the plaza is the library branch, which will offer digital media spaces, vocational services and an area filled with books chosen by the Obamas themselves. A short walk away is Home Court, a glassy structure with a full basketball court, designed by Moody Nolan Architects, which contains workout spaces and doubles as a large event venue.
The green spaces, designed by the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh to merge with the site’s buildings, play a crucial role in minimizing the impact of the center on Jackson Park. Meadows and curved walking paths are already taking shape. Above the library will be a fruit and vegetable garden, modeled on Mrs. Obama’s Kitchen Garden at the White House, featuring a teaching kitchen and picnic area. And over the center’s 400-spot parking garage is a two-acre playground where kids can plunge down steep slides or crawl inside giant spider webs.
Its Great Lawn, intended for picnicking and outdoor movies, has a constructed hill for winter sledding (by special request of the former first lady). The shaped landscapes will funnel excess water toward basins that can capture 98 percent of rain that falls on site. The center’s buildings, meanwhile, will be 100 percent electric, drawing energy from on-site solar panels and from off-site renewable energy sources. Heating and cooling will be provided by geothermal wells dug into the south end of the site.
Fears of Losing Parkland, and Gentrification
The center has not been welcomed by everyone on the South Side.
As early as 2018 a cohort of local park groups filed suits to keep the parkland — designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition — under public ownership. They did not succeed.
“We feel like if somebody doesn’t step up to protect parks and keep them open to the public, that the natural, easy road is that that they will disappear over time,” said Van Bistrow, president of the Nichols Park Advisory Council, one of the plaintiffs. Mr. Bistrow now supports the project (“we’ve moved on,” he said.)
The center’s design team argues that the park site had already been compromised by alterations over the years, and that the new landscape will lead to a net gain in trees and parkland. The six-lane Cornell Drive, which sliced through the green space, has been replaced by a pedestrian promenade connecting the center to the rest of the park, and to the adjacent Museum of Science and Industry.
Others worry that the center will be another potential agent of gentrification and displacement in the Woodlawn neighborhood and nearby communities.
Dixon Romeo, the executive director of Southside Together, a local group that joined with more than a dozen others to push the Obama Foundation, the city and the University of Chicago to make binding agreements to help the community, said that rents in areas adjacent to the center have spiked. Developers, he said, have been buying up buildings, forcing out low-income tenants, and creating new luxury developments capitalizing on the center’s (and the Obamas’) prestige.
“How do we ensure that the city of Chicago does not let this be another case of something that was supposed to help Black folks actually hurt them?” Mr. Romeo asked.
In 2020 the Chicago City Council passed the Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance, which, among other things, set aside vacant lots on the South Side for mixed-income housing and set certain affordability requirements on city-owned land. A similar measure for the nearby South Shore passed on Sept. 24. The Obama Foundation committed to hiring local workers and helping direct investment to local businesses.
Some neighbors are excited for the benefits the center could bring. Carol Adams, a longtime resident of the South Side, said it would help shore up property values for those, like her, “who’ve been here for years, who paid and invested in our homes,” and later saw them devalued.
Mr. Obama said he believed that “the possibilities for residents of benefiting from what we’re doing will vastly outweigh some of the disruptions that happen whenever you start a big project like this.”
“Look, this is always a challenge, right?” Mr. Obama said. “I mean, yeah, people want investments in their community, because that creates economic opportunities.” But he acknowledged, “There’s always the potential for higher property values and the classic woes of gentrification.”
He reeled off some of the opportunities the center would create for young people in adjacent communities: collaborations with local schools and businesses, internships at nearby museums or with the center’s restaurants; meetings with sports executives; recording sessions between local kids and noted musicians.
“We could have found some greenfield site that was a heck of a lot easier and would have been cheaper and faster,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re doing this,” he added, “particularly for young people in these communities to see what’s possible and feel inspired.”
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