The ‘Obamalisk’: A monument to a lost America

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A drone view of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, June 3. Eric Cox/Reuters

Chicago’s South Side has an unusual new neighbour. It is 70 metres tall, dressed in grey granite and largely faceless. Rising from verdant Jackson Park, this mass of stone is capped with a message in tall concrete letters: “You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, because you’re ready to seize what ought to be.”

This is the Obama Presidential Center, a campus honouring the legacy of the former president that opens to the public on June 19. The words come from Barack Obama’s 2015 Selma speech on the civil rights movement – language that appeals to America’s better angels.

But its words wrap around the building’s corner, so what I saw last week from nearby East 60 th Street was found poetry: “YOU ARE AMERICA/ED BY HABIT AND/UNENCUMBERED.”

This glitch is symptomatic of the Obama Center, a place that’s encumbered with its own contradictions. The lavish US$850-million project stands apart from the surrounding low-income neighbourhoods. It honours a leader whose career began with community organizing, but delivers architecture that is oppressively monumental.

The complex, designed principally by New York’s Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, or TWBTA, is Mr. Obama’s version of a presidential library – though it does not actually hold any presidential records.

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The Obama Center was designed principally by New York’s Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA). 'Our first question was: Can a building represent a vision?' architect Billie Tsien of TWBTA said at a media preview. Joshua Lott/Reuters

Instead, three buildings of granite, bronze and silk-smooth concrete flank a public plaza. There is the tower, which holds an Obama museum; the Forum, with an auditorium and restaurant; and a colourful, hospitable branch of the Chicago Public Library. A nearby sports building completes the ensemble, along with a generous 20 acres of green space.

Its primary job is symbolic. “Our first question was: Can a building represent a vision?” architect Billie Tsien of TWBTA said last week at a media preview. “The tower establishes a landmark, because [Obama’s] was obviously a landmark presidency, and it’s a landmark time in the history of the United States.”

This message of hope and progress seems to align with Mr. Obama’s sensibility, and also that of the architects. TWBTA are known for cultural and university buildings that frame intimate spaces with bespoke details.

But the Obama complex sends brash, confusing messages. The tower has been a local flashpoint since its design was revealed in 2017. The architects and Mr. Obama wanted it to resemble four hands clasped together and reaching for the sky. That idea is invisible in the final form – a shaft of grey stone that rises abruptly from the landscape.

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Obama Foundation Chief Executive Officer Valerie Jarrett said the project's main goal is to serve young Chicagoans and Americans. The foundation’s global leadership programs will meet here, alongside public talks, concerts, basketball games and activities for youth. Joshua Lott/Reuters

Under grey skies, the building’s skin of New Hampshire granite stands dull and mute. In bright sun, the striations of the stone and facets of the surface invite a distant gaze. Locals have dubbed this the “Obamalisk,” which fits.

It also resembles a tombstone. It is perhaps a memorial to a lost America: an America of earnest if partial possibility, a place where “yes we can” was a cry of hope and not of gleeful impunity.

For Barack and Michelle Obama, the centre is an embassy of liberal good governance. Valerie Jarrett, a longtime Obama adviser and now chief executive of the Obama Foundation, said its main goal is to serve young Chicagoans and Americans. “We want them to feel like their dreams can come true, and that here, hope has a permanent home.” The foundation’s global leadership programs will meet here, alongside public talks, concerts, basketball games and activities for youth.

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A staff member works against a backdrop of a basketball mural at the Home Court building next to the Main Court basketball court at the Obama Presidential Center. Joshua Lott/Reuters

But the centre lacks a public archive, and so it breaks from the peculiar American tradition of the presidential library. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, former presidents have mostly partnered with the government to create quasi-public institutions of research and public history. Mr. Obama – like Richard Nixon before him – opted out. Records are online in a “digital library” instead, and the original papers in a suburban federal warehouse.

Within the foundation’s fief, the museum is the main attraction. Its display tells the story of Mr. Obama’s rise from humble beginnings – a poster for a steak fry in the 2008 Iowa primaries and earnest h…