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Where Hope Has a Gift Shop

The nostalgic architecture of the Obama Presidential Center

The Nostalgic Architecture of the Obama Presidential Center

Where hope even has a gift shop.

The Obama Presidential Center.

“Hope now has a permanent home,” 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’s 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.

Tina Tchen is here to announce the foundation’s new leadership initiatives, which are about as revealing as the perfunctory placards and memorializations of “hope” and “change” all around us. These include a mid-career program for “the next generation of leaders”—not only “NGO leaders,” we are told, but“folks who are military leaders, who are in government, who are in business, big and small, who are in academia.” Among the participants, 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 sure!

Tchen is soon followed by John Roberson, formerly the city of Chicago’s chief operating officer and now the incoming executive vice president of the Obama Center. Roberson tells the audience 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 also important because it captures a notable element of Obama’s presidency: promising social change only to implement economic austerity, for example, or bailing out the big investment banks while many Americans’ mortgages went belly-up—and with them, the foundations of their lives. It’s rather like the wall downstairs, largely out of sight, where the Obama Foundation’s 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.

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.)

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.

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’t 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.

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’s 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—nearly windowless and clad from top to bottom in New Hampshire granite—which has been variously called by detractors “the Obamalisk” and “the Death Star.”

When a member of the press asked Williams about the criticism of the building’s design and its Star Wars–like 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.

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 “designed to look like four hands coming together.” The exact number of hands that were involved in the design, and whose hands they were, was not made clear—but the extent of Obama’s involvement certainly was, as the........

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