Obama Center Architect Is Annoyed By Obama's Meddling
"'The president was very, very hands on with the design,' says Tsien, with a rueful air." -- from "The Guardian"
From The Guardian:
Towering over a low-income area of Chicago, and wrapped in a speech that’s hard to decipher, this controversial monolith feels like a menacing sci-fi HQ. Is it a monument – or a mausoleum?
Oliver Wainwright
Tue 2 Jun 2026 01.00 EDT
… Behold the $850m Obamalisk – or, as it sometimes feels morbidly like, the Obamausoleum.
Obama was very, very hands on with the design. He wanted to make things more angular and cut
… “We had the idea of a beacon,” says architect Billie Tsien, whose practice, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, won the design competition for the Obama Presidential Center in 2016, on the eve of the first Trump presidency. “We thought of four hands coming together,” she adds, holding her cupped hands up against a colleague’s, as if protecting a flame from the wind.
The Williams-Tsien design firm is probably best known for the 2012 Barnes Foundation art museum in Philadelphia:
Above us, sheer walls of granite erupt from the ground at a steep angle, before tapering to form a chiselled 70-metre-high monolith. It looks hewn and cleft, towering over the 19-acre campus like a stocky, truncated obelisk. Rising above the low-rise, low-income neighbourhood, the building has an ominous presence, its mostly windowless heft recalling a menacing sci-fi headquarters, with small chamfered openings suggesting portals from where drones might be launched, or lasers fired. Some have compared it to a flak tower, others to a “Klingon prison”. If it is a beacon of hope, it seems to be one that has been fortified at all costs against the present regime, a defensive bunker to protect its fragile values from siege.
“The president was very, very hands on with the design,” says Tsien, with a rueful air. “He talked a lot about his love of Brâncuși.”
The Obama Center looks like a Brutalist botching of the elegant Brancusi, “Golden Bird,” on display at the Art Institute of Chicago:
That’s the Romanian sculptor who was known for his carved, abstract forms. “And he wanted to make things more angular and cut. To make a form, and then try to work out what goes inside it, is really the opposite of how we’ve worked before. It was a very foreign exercise.”
Obama has spoken of wanting to be an architect, before he chose law, and he clearly relished the chance to wield his conceptual chisel.
Obama has spoken of architect Vladimir Ossipoff’s “Hawaiian modernism,”
such as Liljestrand House, which looks like a nice post-hippie era motel, and the chapel at Punahou School.
“When you have a client who says that, you get kind of …
Paywall here.
