The most expensive presidential library in U.S. history opens this week, bringing Barack Obama’s $850 million center to life after more than a decade of planning — and offering a test of how such monuments to former commanders in chief can function as a civic hub.
Like its namesake, who was the first Black president and the first from Chicago, the Obama Presidential Center treads new ground. The center's design, a granite-clad, eight-story, main tower with few windows and uneven lines — with a section near the top that offsets carved words from a 2015 speech — doesn't look like other presidential libraries. What's more, its stone face is juxtaposed against the greenery of new fruit and vegetable gardens, a Great Lawn and a nature-based children's playground.
The center opening Friday doesn't act like other presidential monuments, either. Its aspirations are reflected in its name, aspiring to be a hub of activity rather than a lure for academic scholars and symposia. Beyond the lawn and gardens, the center also offers artwork, including an 83-foot-tall abstract stained glass mural, a ceiling painting and a variety of sculpture, along with an NBA-regulation basketball court and a Chicago Public Library branch.
Those are 21st-century additions within historic Jackson Park, just west of Lake Michigan, the 19th-century design by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and featuring lagoons, cherry trees and Japanese gardens. The nearby Griffin Museum of Science & Industry, housed within a building from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, is already a major cultural draw in the city.
Where former President Bill Clinton’s library in Arkansas emphasizes a glass-heavy, modernist design meant to evoke openness, and George W. Bush’s library in Dallas leans into a red-brick, institutional style typical of a traditional campus, Obama’s center also differs in another way. It is not operated by the National Archives like those predecessors — or President Joe Biden’s planned library — as it swaps the conventional archive-focused approach with the broader cultural campus.
It also differs from the standard architecture of what may be coming. In March, President Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump, presented the idea of a future Trump library and museum as a Miami skyscraper complete with golden escalator, military aircraft, the Qatari-gifted Air Force One and a major indoor venue with views overlooking Biscayne Bay. The project is being funded through a combination of private donations, corporate contributions and significant legal settlements, with plans to raise nearly $1 billion dollars, according to media reports.
CoStar News reached out to the center's operator, the Obama Foundation, for a comment but didn’t get a response.
Architect Obama
Designed by husband-and-wife architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the Chicago presidential center was intended by Obama to resemble four upraised hands holding a lantern of light.
"The architecture of this place must embody both the symbolic nature of the Obama presidency while serving pragmatic functions of an active institution inspiring local, national and international dialogue," the architects' website says.
Opening the center on Juneteenth, a national holiday marking the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people were freed by federal troops in Texas, is a sign that Obama's legacy as the first Black president was on his mind in creating the campus that aims to include the public.
In interviews, the architects have described Obama as hands-on throughout the project.
Obama “was one of the clients who walks in and says, ‘Well, if I hadn’t been a president, I would’ve been an architect,’” Tsien told Chicago Tribune architecture critic Edward Keegan. “Anybody in practice, their stomach always slightly clinches, because you know, this person’s going to try to be the architect.”
But the architects credited Obama with having more good suggestions than bad. They deflected criticism of the design, saying it is meant to stand as a monument to Obama and his place in history.
“For some people it will feel monumental and I’m not sorry that it’s monumental,” Tsien told the newspaper. “A lot of the people who are coming are Black and they walk in and they see something that’s monumental and they feel for the first time, it’s theirs. It’s their monument."
Tsien added that “this is really about monumentalizing not only the man, but the actual presidency and the fact that this happened in this country at this time,” Tsien added. “The people deserve that monument, so I’m not sorry.”
New South Side museum
In Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, home to the University of Chicago, letters atop the Obama center tower spell out a passage from the 44th president’s 2015 speech honoring the 50th anniversary of civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. The inscription points to a broader aim — creating a cultural engine designed to pull visitors and energy into the South Side.
The local branch of the Chicago Public Library in the complex holds a replica of the Oval Office and memorabilia such as the Nobel Peace Prize and some of First Lady Michelle Obama’s iconic dresses in a museum-like setting.
A $30 general admission ticket covers the museum’s timed-entry exhibits — including its multi-floor galleries and immersive installations — while most of the surrounding 19-acre campus operates as a free, open-access public space.
The gardens, playgrounds, sledding hills and lagoon overlooks are accessible daily at no cost, along with civic and community-focused facilities like the library and athletic center built around the basketball court.
The presidential center is about 7 miles south of downtown.
Obama has ties to the immediate area. He is a one-time South Side community organizer who later served in the Illinois state senate and U.S. Senate before being elected president and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for 12 years. He and Michelle Obama are longtime homeowners in the nearby Kenwood neighborhood, though their primary residence is now in Washington, D.C.
The privately funded center's placement in a National Register-listed park triggered lawsuits over the transfer of public land and historic preservation, contributing to delays and cost overruns that have stretched the project well beyond the eight years Obama was in office.
More legal issues have popped up recently. Crain's Chicago Business reported this month that some local contractors are fighting to collect millions of dollars in unpaid bills.
From complaints to compliments
Presidential libraries often have been criticized for their design. It's no surprise that one that breaks with design tradition, in a city where architecture discussions are sport, has stirred lively conversations.
Reviews of the project have ranged from complaints about what have been described as harsh and bulky elements of the granite main tower to kudos for the overall urban park setting and potential as a public hub.
The evolving structure and its unique role are taking time for critics to digest.
Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey, who previously criticized the mostly windowless main structure for what he called a funereal appearance, recently praised the overall campus as “one of the best urban spaces in the city, maybe second only to Millennium Park.”
Bey pointed out how perceptions of tradition-shattering public displays can change over years or decades. He cited the example of a massive Pablo Picasso sculpture on Daley Plaza in the center of the Loop business district, a somewhat discordant sight that was unloved after it was unveiled in 1967 — before becoming a symbol of the city “once we got to know it.”
He added: “The Obama Center is worthy of the same consideration.”
Oliver Wainwright, an architecture critic for The Guardian, noted that the 225-foot-tall centerpiece has a resemblance to a defensive bunker amid the current political climate. Republican President Trump has been a vocal critic of Obama, a Democrat, and has included his presidential center in that derision.
“Behold the $850m Obamalisk — or, as it sometimes feels morbidly like, the Obamausoleum,” Wainwright wrote.
Other criticisms appear to have had less contemplation than snark. As the finished product has come clearly into view in recent weeks, critics have compared the mostly windowless main structure to a garbage can or, in a Star Trek reference, a “Klingon prison.”
Even so, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman took a broader view. He described the architecture as “ambitious and formidable,” while noting that, depending on the angle or lighting, the main tower looks either like a beacon or appears cold and forbidding.
From street level, carved words atop the tower “are illegible, the lettering bunched together like Cheerios in a box,” Kimmelman wrote. But stepping beyond those mechanical concerns, he credited the project with achieving one of the highest goals of architecture as it relates to its surroundings: He said it clearly improved its park and neighborhood.