President Barack Hussein Obama wanted a monument in Chicago, and Chicago gave him parkland, patience, tax breaks, years of disruption, and now a tower that looks less like civic memory than self-regard poured into granite.
The Obama Presidential Center opens to the public June 19 in Jackson Park, a historic South Side park once shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted's vision. The Obama Foundation calls it an “awe-inspiring 19-acre campus.”
Many Chicagoans can look at the same structure and see something colder.
The building matches the man's politics. Obama, the 44th president, sold hope in polished speeches while leaving the country more divided than he found it. My criticism of Obama has never been about race; it's about ideology, arrogance, and the habit of treating dissent as a moral defect.
His center carries the same spirit: it rises over a working neighborhood like a lecture in stone, built by people who always sound certain they know what is best for everyone else.
The design has already drawn brutal reactions. The main tower has been described as a mostly windowless granite monolith, with critics comparing it to a fortified sci-fi prison.
Architect Billie Tsien, co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, said Obama was “very, very hands-on with the design” and wanted angular forms inspired by sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. From The Guardian:
So, how to symbolise hope, justice, equality and all the other bygone values that Obama championed in his meteoric ascent to the White House? How to commemorate the first Black president in history, in whom so much transformational faith was vested, at a time when so many of his achievements are being relentlessly rolled back?
“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.
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.” 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.”
That detail tells us exactly everything we already know; the final product feels less like a public place than a former president's theory of himself.
The location has always been the deeper insult. The Obama Foundation built the center inside Jackson Park, part of a National Register-listed landscape, after years of lawsuits and complaints from people who objected to turning public parkland into a privately operated campus.
Protect Our Parks founder Herb Caplan argued the city effectively gave the foundation a 99-year deal for $10 and no real estate taxes. Courts let the project move forward, but a legal win doesn't make the public concern vanish. From WTTW:
“The principal argument is that there is actually a statute in the Park District code that says public parks property cannot be distributed to a private party for private use without providing substitute property of equal or greater value that will be used for outdoor public park purposes,” says Herb Caplan, founder and president of Protect Our Parks. “The city of Chicago bypassed that statute altogether.”
Caplan says the current deal “essentially gifts it to the Obama Foundation for 99 years for just $10.” He also notes the Obama Presidential Center will not have to pay real estate taxes.
According to Caplan, “the whole arrangement was illegal from the start” under both the U.S. and Illinois constitutions because it takes public land for private use.
“It’s a denial of the public trust doctrine,” Caplan said Wednesday. “I think that the real problem and the thing that concerns me the most is that a lot of people that support the project are not aware of exactly how invasive this project is going to be and are unaware of the legal principles that are involved.”
Money now adds another layer of ugliness. Contractors and subcontractors say they're owed millions as the center nears its opening. Omar Shareef, president of the African American Contractors Association, said seven subcontractors contacted him for help over missing payments: some are owed seven figures.
Lakeside Alliance, the project's general contractor, said closeout disputes can continue after doors open, including reviews of invoices, change orders, and other contract issues.
One dispute already spilled into federal court. II in One, a black-owned concrete subcontractor, filed a $40 million lawsuit against Thornton Tomasetti, the structural engineering firm, alleging false claims and racial discrimination. From The Architect's Newspaper:
The lawsuit alleges that Thornton Tomasetti tried to “cover up” its own performance failures when employees of that company sent a letter to The Obama Foundation indicating that project delays and cost overruns happened thanks to “underperformance and inexperience of the concrete sub-contractor.” The engineering firm also allegedly said that the “contractor and subcontractor firms that were not minority owned could have completed the work without problems.”
“In essence,” the lawsuit continues, “the defendants told the project owner, falsely, that all of the project delays and cost overruns were the fault of the minority-owned firms, and that ‘more qualified’ firms (such as the firms that happen not to be owned by racial minorities) would not have required as much assistance or had as many ‘problems.’” [Parenthesis in original.]
“Unjustified and Discriminatory Conduct”
The plaintiffs claim that Thornton Tomasetti’s conduct is out of step with the project’s Diversity and Inclusion Plan, a facet, the lawsuit said, that emphasizes “maintaining an environment in which diversity and inclusion are valued and respected in all aspects of its operations as well as the operations of its partners and third-party contractors.”
Thornton Tomasetti has denied wrongdoing; whatever the courts decide, the optics are grim: a project wrapped in equity language now has contractors fighting over payment and blame while the ribbon-cutting machinery rolls on.
The endowment question deserves scrutiny, too. The Obama Foundation once cited $470 million for an endowment meant to sustain the center's operations for generations. The foundation says the center is fully funded through private contributions and plans significant endowment investment in coming years. Critics point to filings showing only $1 million in the reserve fund while the project's construction cost has climbed to at least $850 million. From the The Real Deal:
The delays and skyrocketing costs were caused in part by the pandemic and in part by a half-decade legal battle. By the time the groundbreaking ceremony was held in 2021, the cost was pegged at $830 million. The center will finally open on next Friday, the Juneteenth holiday, and the public will gain access to the work of roughly 475 subcontractors, according to the outlet.
Some of the struggles with contractors have been out in the open for months. A spat between Thornton Tomasetti and Obama Center subcontractor II in One spilled over into a $40 million federal lawsuit that saw the black-owned II in One file a lawsuit against Thornton for alleged false claims and racial discrimination. Thornton is the firm managing structural engineering and design services for the development. According to the publication, there are other subcontractors engaging with legal counsel to resolve payment disputes.
Lakeside Alliance, the general contractor for the project, claimed that the project’s size and the amount of moving parts mean the negotiations and strain are normal. In a statement, Lakeside said the Obama Center’s “contractual closeout — including the review and resolution of outstanding invoices, change orders and other project matters — continues long after the doors open.”
The neighborhood cost may be harder to measure but easier to feel. Housing advocates say short-term rental licenses rose 46% in Chicago's 20th Ward, which includes much of Woodlawn, while citywide licenses fell 38% over the same period.
Residents near the center have worried for years about rent hikes, displacement, and investors turning a neighborhood into a tourist zone before local families get much benefit.
Obama's center was supposed to bring change home. Instead, it looks like a monument to the same old ruling-class bargain: take public space, praise the community, hire consultants, polish the speeches, and leave ordinary people to wonder who really gets helped.
The building is ugly, but the arrogance behind it is worse.
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