A Better World at the Obama Center
The new campus is an expression of the former US president's civic ideals, and a reminder of how distant they now seem.
CHICAGO — I did not expect to find myself in tears while touring the Obama Presidential Center (OPC). The campus’s central building, a nearly windowless 225-foot (~68.6 m) granite tower dubbed the “Obamalith,” looks from afar exactly like what its nickname promises. And then there’s the reality that during President Barack Obama’s eight years in office, he vastly expanded and normalized the use of armed drones, wrecked Libya, failed to close Guantanamo Bay, and oversaw record-high ICE deportations.
And yet, this being Trump’s America, visiting the OPC felt like being in an alternate reality. One where people of diverse origin, ability, and belief co-exist peacefully and productively; the value of the environment, public space, human health, and the arts finds expression everywhere, for everyone; and the future appears collaborative and hopeful.
Structurally, these principles arise from a 19.3-acre (~76,890 sq m) campus designed by architects Billie Tsien and Todd Williams with landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh. The sustainably planned grounds contain biodiverse gardens, a great lawn, picnic tables, barbecues, a sledding hill, a massive playground, and loads of trails open all day, every day, to the general public. Also free to the public are a state-of-the-art indoor basketball court-slash-community center designed by local Black-owned firm Moody Nolan; a new branch of the Chicago Public Library; and the Forum, featuring extensive common areas, a restaurant, reservable recording studios, and an intimate auditorium. Nearly every space has been named for a person who genuinely deserves the respect, from Nelson Mandela to Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old Chicago honor student killed by a stray bullet just days after performing as a majorette in Obama’s second inauguration parade. The undeniably foreboding Museum Tower isn’t even all that bad up close, and it works well enough from the inside, with four ascending floors of dynamic exhibits happy to be protected from daylight.
As in the Obama White House, so in the Obama Presidential Center. Michelle Obama’s focus on healthy foods and fit bodies reflects in the expansive vegetable gardens and exercise-forward park facilities. Both Obamas’ deep roots in the perennially disinvested South Side of Chicago — it’s where she grew up and he became a community organizer — explains the choice of location. Their sophisticated support for the arts, including the choicest selection probably ever hung at the White House (digitally recapped in a display on Level 4 of the museum), continues with a prominent series of art commissions spread out across the campus, indoors and out, most of it freely accessible, almost all of it very good, comfortably contemporary, temperamentally on-brand, and totally uncontentious.
Left: exterior of the Obama Presidential Center; right: Julie Mehretu’s “Uprising of the Sun” can only be seen in its entirety from outside the Museum. Inside, visitors pass it by as they ride the elevator up between the central ticketed levels
