ARCHITECTURE · CHICAGO
Reading time: 10 minFor almost a dozen years, the tower at the heart of the Obama Presidential Center was mocked before it was even built, compared to a prison, a mausoleum, a giant bin. Now that it is finished and open in Chicago’s Jackson Park, a stranger thing has happened: the same critics have begun to change their minds. The reason lies in a single idea that the early renderings could never show. This was never really a building. It is a landscape, and the tower is only its most visible gesture.
Some buildings are easy to love in a drawing and disappointing in the flesh. The Obama Presidential Center is the opposite. For years its Museum Tower, the campus’s most visible structure, was a what-on-earth-is-that kind of building, a stocky, square-jawed, granite-clad and almost windowless form rising 225 feet out of the green expanse of Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side. In a city that worships the glass skyscraper, it looked wilfully solid. Critics reached for the cruellest comparisons they could find, from a maximum-security prison to an oversized garbage can, and even the architecture writers who now admire it once called it funereal.
Then it opened, on June 19, 2026, Juneteenth, and something shifted. Walk the completed campus, designed by New York’s Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects with landscape by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and the tower stops reading as a fortress and starts reading as a monument. That reversal is the most interesting architectural story in America right now, and it turns on one decision the Obamas made a decade ago, when they chose their architects. They did not pick a building. They picked a campus. Everything that puzzles people about the tower makes sense the moment you understand that it was never meant to stand alone.
A campus, not a monument to one architect’s ego
Go back to December 2015. Seven celebrated firms were invited to bid for the commission, and most of them did what you would expect, proposing a signature object, a single iconic building to carry a president’s name. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien won because they proposed the opposite. Their pitch was a campus, an ensemble of buildings and public spaces that grow out of the park rather than sitting on top of it. “We believe that architecture is the coming together of art and use,” they have said, “and can bring a sense of grace to life.” That philosophy, quiet and slightly unfashionable in an age of spectacle, is the key to the whole project.
What they have built on 19.3 acres is not a museum with some grounds attached. It is a connected setting of five principal structures, the Museum Tower, the Forum, a Chicago Public Library branch, the John Lewis Plaza that stitches them together, and the freestanding Home Court athletics building, all woven into a landscape that behaves as architecture in its own right. Paths, lawns and gathering places move between and around the buildings, so the park is not a frame for the Center but a participant in it. You do not arrive at a door. You walk into a place.
When the landscape becomes the architecture
The boldest move here is one you feel with your feet rather than see in a photograph. Across much of the site, the ground itself climbs up and over the buildings, terracing onto their rooftops to create sloping, accessible lawns you can actually walk on. The result is a net gain of 3.7 new acres of parkland, green space added back to Jackson Park rather than taken from it, threaded with more than three miles of new pathways and layered with gardens.
This matters because Jackson Park is not just any park. It was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, as a democratic ground open to everyone, and building anything tall here was always going to be contentious. Van Valkenburgh’s landscape answers that anxiety not by apologising but by giving more park back than the buildings take. The closure of Cornell Drive knits the parkland back together, sightlines to Lake Michigan are reopened, and pathways reconnect to neighbouring institutions including the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. The campus does not sit against Olmsted’s vision. It extends it. That is why the finished place feels, in the words of one Chicago critic who had previously mocked the tower, like one of the best urban spaces in the city, perhaps second only to Millennium Park.
The tower, up close
Now to the tower itself, and to the paradox at the centre of this story. From a mile away it can look forbidding. Up close, in the granite courtyard it shares with the Forum and the library, it becomes something else entirely: sculptural, angled, beveled, a monument as much as a building. Its south-facing elevation catches the sun and reveals textures and shadows that no rendering ever captured. The blockiness that read as coldness at a distance turns out, on foot, to be gravity.
Its form carries two lovely origin stories. Williams describes it as four hands coming together, a figure for the collective effort it takes to shape history and build a community, the idea that no monument, and no democracy, is the work of one person. Tsien tells a quieter tale, of a small inscribed stone the architects found in a dusty box in a souvenir shop in Aksum, in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, its carved letters unreadable, its age unknowable, but which “felt as if it carried a message.” The tower is that stone at civic scale, a solid thing that seems to hold words you have to work to receive.
There is a practical logic to the solidity too, and it is worth knowing. Despite its height, the tower holds only eight floors plus a lower level, which gives the exhibition galleries unusually generous volumes. And a presidential museum must protect fragile artifacts from daylight and swings in temperature and humidity, which is why the enclosed archival floors present blank granite to the world. The transparency is deliberately concentrated where the public gathers, at the top and the base, where openings frame the city and pull daylight in. The building is clad in New Hampshire granite, a durable civic stone that links it to a long tradition of public architecture and gives it a permanence that feels entirely intentional. Solidity and openness are not in conflict here. They are carefully rationed.
Words of hope, carved into the skyline
The tower’s finest architectural detail is also its most moving. Wrapping two upper corners, around the public gathering space now named the Nelson Mandela Sky Room, is a sculptural screen made of five-foot-tall letters. They spell out excerpts from President Obama’s 2015 speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, set in an adapted version of Gotham, the typeface long associated with his campaigns. “You are America,” the fragments read. “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’”
What makes this more than a slogan is how it works as architecture. The screen is integrated into the facade and doubles as a sunshade, cutting direct light while framing the views out over Chicago’s South and West Sides. You never read the whole passage at once. The words arrive in fragments that shift with your distance and angle, so that the building asks to be explored rather than simply read, and the city itself is glimpsed through the great concrete letters. It is a rare thing, a piece of monumental text that behaves like a living part of the building rather than a caption bolted to it.
The quieter buildings, and who they honour
The tower would be nothing without its companions, and TWBTA have given each a distinct character while keeping the family resemblance. The Forum is the campus’s flexible civic engine, holding the Elie Wiesel Auditorium, a recording studio and media suite, the light-filled Hadiya Pendleton Atrium, and a restaurant, cafe and shop. The Chicago Public Library branch, a first-of-its-kind partnership that embeds a working public library inside a presidential centre, anchors the whole project in everyday access and learning, with a Presidential Reading Room at its heart.
Home Court, the 60,000-square-foot athletics building at the southern edge, is the campus’s most openly joyful structure. Designed by Moody Nolan, the largest Black-owned architecture firm in the United States, its exterior of metal and fritted glass is patterned after the weave of a basketball net, a neat metaphor for connection and a nod to one of the President’s enduring passions. It wears its glass openly, an invitation rather than a wall.
Binding these together is John Lewis Plaza, the granite forecourt that serves as the shared point of arrival. And here the Center does something genuinely unusual. Rather than selling naming rights to the highest bidders, it names its most important spaces after civil rights and social justice figures: the plaza for John Lewis, the auditorium for Elie Wiesel, an overlook for Chicago’s first Black mayor Harold Washington, the vegetable garden for Eleanor Roosevelt, the atrium for Hadiya Pendleton. Every route through the campus becomes an encounter with the history it grew from.
Architecture as ecology
For a project of this ambition, the environmental thinking is not an afterthought bolted on for a certificate. It is structural. The Center runs entirely without fossil fuels for its daily needs, drawing on a campus-wide geothermal system paired with renewable energy to meet all of its heating and cooling, an uncommon feat at this scale in a cold Midwestern city. Stormwater is treated as a resource rather than a nuisance, captured and reused on site to spare Chicago’s overburdened sewers and ease the flooding that has long troubled Jackson Park, saving more than a million gallons of potable water a year.
The most poetic expression of this is the Ann Dunham Water Garden, named for the President’s mother, which folds an installation by the artist Maya Lin into the site’s actual water-management strategy, so that infrastructure and art become the same thing. More than 900 native and climate-resilient trees across some 50 species have been planted, roughly a third of the site has been restored with native planting, and the building facades use bird-safe, non-reflective glass to protect migratory species. This is landscape as ecological repair, a civic institution that leaves its park healthier than it found it.
Final thoughts
The lesson of the Obama Presidential Center is a lesson about patience, and about the limits of the rendering. For twelve years people judged this project by its most photographable feature, a tall granite tower in a beloved park, and by that measure it was easy to condemn. What the images could never convey was the thing that actually defines the place: that the tower is one vertical note in a horizontal, walkable, generous landscape, and that the whole point of the design was to give the public more than it asked for and to disappear, as much as a 225-foot building can, into a living park.
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have made a work of civic architecture that rewards the slow, physical act of moving through it, which is exactly the opposite of the instant icon the age tends to demand. Its solidity is not coldness but permanence. Its blankness is not secrecy but care for what it holds. And its tower, misread for so long, turns out to be a monument in the oldest and best sense, a solid form carrying words, standing where many hands raised it, in a park it has quietly made greater. It asks only that you come, and walk, and look again.
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