The Obama Presidential Center finally opened to the public on Friday (not that you care), and the verdict from the internet was swift and brutal. People are calling it a "monstrous insult to architecture," a "concrete nightmare," and simply a "monstrosity." Social media has spent the week comparing the thing to a trash can and a dystopian movie set, which, having seen the photos, feels generous.
It’s hideous.
Naturally, the man who helped design the building's most mocked feature has a different take. Chris Bird, the Washington structural engineer who designed the upper portion of the center's towering centerpiece, sat down with Fox News Digital just before the doors opened and insisted the design is not a monstrosity at all. It's a "grand gesture." A "bold statement." Something with "no architectural precedent."
“The architects knew with the client that they wanted to do something bold at the top of the tower, and the vision of the speech came to life,” Bird told Fox News Digital.
I’d blame Obama, too.
I was in architecture for years before I started writing for PJ Media. At no point in the design process, based on the publicly available renderings, did this ever look great. I like bold architecture myself. I can be somewhat of a traditionalist, but I’m also a fan of Frank Gehry. You don’t get much bolder than that. The Obama Center doesn’t come across as bold; it comes across as dystopian and authoritarian. Which, actually, is appropriate for anything connected to Obama, but not really what they wanted to project, I’m sure.
The tower features 91 words pulled from Obama's speeches, wrapped around a corner of the building in 433 individual letters, each about five feet tall. Curiously, "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" is not on there. Bird described the process of working with the architects and graphic designers to "shape and move a speech, splice it and put it on a building" as "really unprecedented."
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Bird insists the criticism is overblown. He claimed that the building "anchors" its South Side neighborhood, that it blends nicely with the surrounding 19.3-acre campus, and that visitors have had an emotional reaction to the place. "It's nothing but smiles and some tears sometimes," he said.
Can you hear my eyes rolling?
"I think everyone finds a bit of themselves that they knew or didn't know they needed here, which is really special." Hilariously, Fox News Digital spoke with more than a dozen attendees who used words like "phenomenal," "breathtaking," and "futuristic" to describe it. I’m guessing these are the same people who cheered when Obama blew his nose during a campaign rally in 2008. These aren’t serious people with an ability to be objective; they’ll praise anything with Obama’s name on it because that’s what they’re supposed to.
But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s ugly. In fact, last year, locals were blasting the “monstrosity” going up in their neighborhood and complaining that it caused rents and property taxes to skyrocket. Between that and how Obama made health care more expensive, I can’t help but wonder what all the Obama nostalgia is all about. Adding insult to injury, while locals are paying more in rent and taxes because of the project, the Obama Foundation acquired the property through a corrupt land deal that only costs $10 a year to lease from the city. Ten dollars. For 19 acres in one of the most valuable cities in the country.
The left's devotion to Obama has never been about substance. It's a cult of personality, and all these years later, it’s still going strong.
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