NYT: The Obamalisk "Glowers like the Eye of Sauron"
Other terms the NYT unleashes on the new Obama Center: "Forbidding," "brooding," "blocky," "boulder," "cold," "jarring," "illegible," with "lettering bunched together like Cheerios in a box."
The New York Times architecture critic really doesn’t like the Obama Monument to Self in Chicago’s Jackson Park:
Obama Center’s Two Sides: A Lovely Park and a Forbidding Tower
In Chicago, the $850 million Obama Presidential Center aims to remake a neighborhood with a 19.3-acre community hub and a brooding 225-foot museum.
By Michael Kimmelman, Visuals by Lyndon French
June 2, 2026
The Obama Presidential Center has dropped on Chicago’s South Side. Its signature building is a blocky, granite-clad museum tower that the former president wanted to look like four upraised hands.
Maybe it’s me but I don’t see it.
I see a boulder in a park.
The center arrives after years of planning, $850 million in private fund-raising, spasms of community blowback, and eye-rolling about the glamorous, brooding, unapologetic 225-foot-tall “Obamalisk.”
The architecture is certainly ambitious and formidable. The center is built for the ages to celebrate the nation’s first Black president.
It’s also the tallest monument yet to presidential self-glorification, although the current occupant of the Oval Office is contemplating a post-presidential billboard on the Miami skyline that would be several times taller.
… When sunlight after a rain turns the gray stone pink, the building can look like a beacon.
But from other angles, it’s cold and forbidding.
Note that June 2 is likely the nicest, freshest, greenest day of the year in Chicago. What will this gray behemoth look like on January 2?
Besides bone-chilling?
That’s a jarring vibe for a project whose most groundbreaking ambition is to reimagine the presidential library as a warm, welcoming community hub. …
The tower’s top floor, called the Sky Room, opens onto panoramic views of Chicago through letters made of precast concrete, pigmented to match the stone facade. The words are culled from a presidential speech in 2015 commemorating the march on Selma, Ala. …
But little of this uplifting messaging is made explicit on the outside.
From the street the carved granite words from Selma are illegible, the lettering bunched together like Cheerios in a box.
I’ve seen hundreds of pictures of the building, but I’ve never once mustered the willpower to try to decipher the words.
You just know that it won’t be worth the effort. But … that it also won’t be amusingly bad either …
Okay, here’s the Obama oratory:
You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.
Like I expected: dull, but not bad enough to be funny.
Back to the NYT:
Standing just below it in Jackson Park, the tower looms like a castle keep, its mass and height in tension with the park’s pastoral beauty and origins. …
Jackson Park dates back to the 1870s. Olmsted and Vaux, the geniuses behind Central Park, were its original designers. …
Turning prized public parkland over to a private foundation irked local community groups who argued there were better locations for the center, including vacant lots bordering Washington Park, another Olmsted creation to the west, which needed the investment more.
Jackson Park won out because the Obamas reportedly preferred its proximity to Lake Michigan and the Museum of Science and Industry.
Amenity-laden Jackson Park is between the lakefront and upscale Hyde Park, home to the well-policed U. of Chicago. Washington Park is only a mile inland, but it’s in the ‘hood.
Local groups also pressed the Obama Foundation to enter into community benefit agreements to safeguard affordable housing in the area and forestall gentrification. The foundation declined.
But the foundation has delivered on other commitments it made to improve Jackson Park and to bring perks to the neighborhood. …
The highway’s removal allowed Van Valkenburgh, Williams and Tsien to knit Jackson Park together again and to weave the Obama campus into it. The museum tower glowers like the Eye of Sauron but other buildings on campus are skillfully masked from Jackson Park. …
The library’s roof supports the fruit and vegetable garden. An underground garage provides a base for a sledding hill that borders a wetland retreat that can retain storm water during heavy rains.
The sledding hill sounds like the nicest feature. Chicago is extraordinarily flat, so there’s no place for kids to sled in winter except on artificial slopes like Cricket Hill on the north lakefront.
There’s also a good-looking public library and a public athletic facility, which sound like they can’t hurt.
I can imagine children playing there, and, its tower loved or not, the center becoming a South Side staple and a beehive for local residents.
Too bad about the huge, ugly building, though.
Why are there …
Paywall here.
