The soon to be opened ‘privately funded’ President Obama Center, which IS the 44th US President’s Library, is ready..
It would be easy to parody the Obama Foundation’s 19.3-acre complex, which opens June 19, and plenty of critics and politicians already have. The 225-foot-tall stone-clad tower, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, has been dubbed the Obamalisk, and architecture traditionalists, who have thrown their lot in with President Donald Trump, have savaged the design as stark, brutalist and fortresslike. Trump weighed in recently with a childish meme on social media: a monumental trash can surrounded by an urban clutter of cars and telephone poles.
This all feels a bit like trying to brand your political opponent before they can make a good first impression. And the Obama center makes a good first impression despite all the negative chatter. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects knows how to create buildings that feel welcoming and open while also cool and contemplative, public space that pulls one out of the fray and into new forms of communion. Like their design for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Obama center is both porous to its urban environment, but with a slightly cloistered sense of detachment once you are inside.
Valerie Jarrett, the longtime Obama adviser who serves as CEO of the Obama Foundation, says the center will be “issue agnostic,” with a focus on convening and developing a new generation of leaders rather than specific engagement with politics or international issues.
“We are a 501(c)3, we are not a political organization, we have nothing to do with politics,” she said in an interview. “This is not a testament to the past. It is an active, living, engaged center that focuses on the future.”…
But, while the Obama center isn’t a presidential library in the old sense, it feels a lot like a modern public library, a building type that has evolved from palaces for reading into multipurpose community centers. It has a restaurant that will be open to the public, a recording studio, meeting rooms that can be reserved for community functions, and an auditorium that is scaled and designed to feel more like a church than a convention space for VIPs. When asked if there were any concerns about convening world leaders in the center’s forum building while kids were hanging out in the library or playing on the rooftop gardens, Emily Bittner, the foundation’s vice president for communications, said, “No, we welcome that tension.”
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