A Visit to Obama’s Presidential Center

Putting aside the gods it glorifies, as architecture, it’s not bad.

T oday, I’m reviewing the Obama Presidential Center, having spent most of a day last week at a press preview of the 19.3 acres, $850 million museum, community center, sports facility, and gardens in Jackson Park between Lake Michigan and the Science and Industry Museum and the University of Chicago. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed most of the buildings, including the museum. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates designed the grounds, a big part of the project.

First, a disclaimer. I loathe the Obamas. Good friends raved about him in early 2008 so I read the first hundred pages of his biography. “This guy’s full of doo-doo,” I thought, and said it to one spellbound friend who then stopped speaking to me. By Election Day, I knew Obama was a hard-left Chicago pol, a faculty-lounge gasbag, and a hothouse flower. He was surely born in the U.S. since his mother didn’t have a passport until he was two, but who was he? A friend of Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and the godawful race pimp Reverend Wright, you say? I know I’m not on their May Day greeting card list. Who or what was behind him? I thought Lady Michelle was an ingrate.

The Obamas’ not-so-secret superpower, and the only thing they’ve mastered, is the insidious culture and language of oppression and white guilt. Now they had tickets to the White House. I didn’t cry, rend my garments, or howl at the moon. Having lived through JFK, LBJ, Carter, and Clinton, I knew how to fast-forward from grief straight to acceptance. The sun will come out tomorrow. How wrong was I. Obama was a fiasco, entitled, over his head, clueless, and a cynic, quite a feat, that, and a race huckster.

I’m an art critic, though, not a political pundit, so I have to start and finish with the architecture and landscaping as art — art that works and has soul — and the public art commissioned for the campus. Mostly, dear readers, I liked what I saw.

I’ve never met the architects but know and admire many of their buildings, first and foremost the precious, lovely Folk Art Museum on W. 53rd Street in New York — sensual, charming, exquisite, and, in a crime against culture, bought and demolished by MoMa, which decided it didn’t fit into their expansion plans. Williams and Tsien also designed the reborn Hood Museum at Dartmouth, the removed and reborn Barnes in Philadelphia, and the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. People seem happy with all of them. The Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College near my home has a crypto-Trot mission and was shepherded by Liz Coleman, then the college’s Evil Queen president, but it’s a lovely building and an ode to Vermont marble.

So the architects are great, but they’re half the team. The client — Obama — was the other half. It’s his pyramid. He told Williams and Tsien that at one point he’d wanted to be an architect. I’ve seen the memes about the place — a dog lifting his leg against an Obama Center hydrant — and heard the dings. A temple, it looms and broods. It looks like a maximum-security prison, a garbage can, $850 mil in cash for a clunker, shovel’s ready, now bury it, Obamalisk, Star Wars, the Eye of Sauron, a blot on the landscape. Mostly, all this is wrong. It was bound to be a distinctive building. It also had to be cutting-edge, of its time, and definitely not Georgian Movie Palace or a train station like George H.W. Bush’s or a luxury tropical hotel like Jimmy Carter’s.

It’s not even a research center. Obama’s archives are digitized, managed by the National Archives, and accessible to all online. I always look at donor walls. Will the center’s donors be happy given its unusual design, left-wing tilt, and incessant aggrandizement? Who knows, but that list of million-dollar-plus donors is a handy guide to those foundations — most are the usual bourgeois socialist money pots — whose endowments ought to be emptied first when the revolution or the tsunami debt crisis comes, or whenever we’ve finally had it à la Henry VIII with monasteries, secular though these are.

Still, I think the Obama Center will be much loved, but I’m not its target audience. It’s aimed at the True Believers and the gullible of all ages, but it’s mostly about civic pride. Most of it is for the people on Chicago’s South Side. They’re proud to have produced a president, to have a new destination museum, and to have all the amenities that the campus now provides. They should be. It’s a big deal for them. I’m very much in favor of civic pride.

The Obama campus has multiple components, but let’s look at the museum. The outside is meant to evoke cupped hands placed side by side, and it does. That references collaboration and the theme of coming together, unrealized since he was so very divisive. A behemoth? Come on. The Flatiron Building from 1902 is a hundred feet taller. I look at new, premium civic architecture and think about how it’ll age and how it relates to the past. The museum, a mix of artifacts but mostly a sound, light, and text show, is eight stories — its ceilings are impressively high — and 225 feet tall, not 47 stories and hundreds of feet taller, as will be President Trump’s. It looks raw, much as a new house looks raw, but trees, as they grow, will soften it. It’s in Chicago, flat as a pancake and home of the skyscraper. Tall buildings on what used to be prairie aren’t new.

The exterior isn’t glossy, doesn’t shimmer, and isn’t sleek. It’s Doric austere. Obama surely prizes a trim, chic, cool look, so I’m surprised he went flinty and stoic. That’s good. The museum building relates to the University of Chicago’s nearby eleven-story, 168-foot-tall arts center, also designed by Tsien and Williams. In many ways, the arts center is its doppelgänger. Neither has one big glass curtain wall like nearly all tall buildings do. Their exteriors are about solidity and mass, not transparency. The museum, and this is worth emphasizing, is a museum. Museums tend not to like streaming light. They have windows, but in most cases they’re few and far between. Museums tend to be horizontal. This one’s vertical. It seems to tower, but it didn’t eat much of the landscape.

The exterior stone is gorgeous. We Vermonters have granite, slate, and marble in our civic and aesthetic blood, since these, milk, and maple syrup are our core commodities. Marble was nixed for the museum because it would bow and crack in Chicago’s extreme weather. It had to be granite, and, after looking at thousands of samples, they chose Tapestry granite, a New Hampshire stone with white, black, gray, and pink swirls and jags. It’s hand-hewn in most spots to enhance the stone’s wild, prehistoric look. For other spots, mostly interior, the architects used smoother, quieter Kitledge granite from another part of the quarry. In sun, cloudy skies, or rain, both granites show distinct textures and shadows. The exterior has truck-size grooves on all sides, animating its mass. Two sides have beveled striations to ease it from too massive a look. There’s a nearly 90-foot painted-glass window on one façade. This balances out the bulk as well.

Two of the four sides of the center’s apex — the top of the tower — are filled with 20 rows of 5-foot-tall letters cast in concrete and dyed to match the color of the façade’s granite. I hate them, as does, I think, everyone except Obama. I don’t like letters or numbers in modern works of visual art, whether by Picasso or Christopher Wool or Jasper Johns. They’re needlessly cryptic and lazy unless they’re from the Bible and thus have God-given heft. Words from Obama are viewed by him and his credulous, adoring masses as biblical. Stating what should be obvious, they’re not. As a public speaker, he’s sonorous, vapid, and often incoherent.

The giant words are from a speech Obama gave on March 7, 2015, in Selma to honor the 50th anniversary of the start of the civil rights march from the notorious Pettus Bridge to Montgomery, Ala. It’s a meaty speech because the subject’s meaty. The tower’s top floors, though, needed both light and some amelioration of the building’s mass. The problem is that the letters are indecipherable from outside. You can’t even read the text in one place since it covers two façades. They look like random Scrabble pieces. Sounds good, but they’re impractical. How liberal. I think a single catchy line — “I stand for motherhood, America, and a hot lunch for orphans” — might have done the trick, but aside from “Yes We Can” and “Hope and Change,” and those are trite billboard slogans, Obama has no catchy lines. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -= there is the United States of America” might have been too provincial, and it doesn’t implicate race. To the Obamas, race explains everything.

Eliza Doolittle lamented the sour state of her time as Henry Higgins’s pupil. “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words,” and I’d say the same of Obama and the speech fragment on the tower. Another option was a quote from someone else, a shot of rhetorical Narcan in the face of an Obama overdose. Never gonna happen. I haven’t visited the Carter, Ford, and Clinton centers, and the other postwar presidents are treated with reverence, to be sure, but not like Little Rocket Man. From inside the tower, the letters look like snazzy abstract windows inspired by a child’s letter blocks.

The top floor of the center, called the Sky Room, has drop-dead views to the south and west and a massive sloped, conical ceiling painted by Idris Kahn. I like Kahn, ceiling paintings, and, at first, I liked his Sky of Hope. It looked like a blue sky, but fragmented so it shimmers. Then I looked closely. More words. Thousands of hand-stamped words from . . . guess who. “Nothing succeeds like excess,” Oscar Wilde told us, but what we have here is a glut. “He’s full of himself” — as Eliza felt, sick and tired of the scold in her life — isn’t the message that Obama wants us to leave with. It’s a short step from there to “he’s full of doo-doo.”

Much has been made about the center’s assault on the 550-acre Jackson Park — 3 percent was carved out for Obamaland — but the complaints are overwrought. The landscape architect told us at the press preview that most of the park’s trees had reached the end of their lifespan. The land that the Obama Center occupies included a running track, forested park land, a Women’s Garden conceived for the 1893 Columbian World Exposition — Chicago’s World’s Fair — as well as a lagoon and a six-lane road. The Tuileries it wasn’t. Parks are artificial things unless they’re places like the Grand Canyon or made from first-growth forest. Central Park is sculpted and tweaked and much built upon, as are other big-city parks and the great urban parks in Europe. The Obamas were very careful to give back to the public their postage stamp of Jackson Park, vastly enhanced.

There’s now a 58,000-square-foot rolling lawn, a new Women’s Garden, a kitchen garden teaching children about fresh food, a wetland walk, and an expanded lagoon. There’s a new playground — I hope they ban helmets and padded suits, but they surely won’t. The road is rerouted, linking that part of the park to Lake Michigan. Thousands of plants that love Chicago weather are there, including more than 900 new native trees, 50 species, strengthening biodiversity.

There are gardens named after Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Pelosi — Obama’s prime minister — and Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, but not his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, the wonderful woman who raised him. She was a banker. At least endow the center’s head fundraiser in her name. The landscape is designed so that excess rainwater goes into the lagoon, not Chicago’s antiquated sewers. The campus greenery is gorgeous and will look more so as the years pass. And it’ll be maintained by the Obama Center, not Chicago’s failed government.

Next week I’ll write about the Obama Center galleries, more about the art, and possibly about presidential centers in general. They’re becoming a scourge, I’m afraid.