Sub-Rural # 61, Obama Presidential Center

The Obama Presidential Center (OPC) opening today on its 19-acre southside campus designed by architects Billie Tsien and Todd Williams with landscape by Michael van Valkenburgh is an extraordinary architectural trek that’s gained much deserved attention but inexplicably just a moderate amount of praise or contemplative scrutiny. The former Jackson Park grounds, now containing bio-diverse gardens, a great lawn, picnic tables, barbecues, a fruit and vegetable garden, an athletic center, sledding hill, playground, and trails, fill journal columns in detail and plenty about the names of donors who have made the museum’s spaces an inestimably organic gift to Chicago.

There’s not enough, however, about how the museum tower’s contours and sight-lines, embedded in and skirting each elevation in trapezoidal fragmentation, flaunt engineering and defy gravity. Its understated Brutalism and Obama’s supergraphic address crowning an epic turret/vessel fittingly speak to ancient border guard structures, temples, and sculpture from the Mediterranean and Meso-America. It’s recognized, on one hand, that the building accomplishes much more than a library or meeting place about the past and that the constitution of its interior depends on a creative exploitation of technology and museum function that not only re-stages history but catapults the future of institutional resourcefulness and edification.

Now it helps, perhaps, that an artifactual pastiche on a revered green site straddling one of the country’s signature educational and architectural establishments is expected to serve a subject of reform, cultural reflection, and biography. But that was the challenge that Obama and his architects did not have to take. They could have designed a conventional library that had hubris and modesty, much like the president’s persona. However, the result would not have the risk and intelligence in what is an exquisite and poignant watchtower model, a building designed to examine the horizon and predict change, and one whose profile and shadow embody care and guardianship. Nor did it have to call attention to the subjects of human struggle and victory on which the OPC and its enduring symbol rests.

The meaning coded in the uniquely proportioned. muscular eight-story tower is mostly attendant to the formal history embedded in its granite cladding, modest glazing, diving inclines and visionary abstraction –  something missing in the frigid velocity of parametric design. The connection between strategic planning and final form is visceral in the photographs of the tower’s construction. These images address the complexity of producing non-orthogonal architecture to achieve a 225-foot tower with shifting asymmetry on non-aligned floors, beyond sloped, green roofs and an underground clean-energy system designed to heat and cool the entire campus without fossil fuels. That may be formally aloof to hacks who think it’s a bit awkward.

The tower’s design processes are as much a response to the monoculture of contemporary mixed-use architecture with it’s passive visual history, and/or the lack of intellectual inquiry in design, materials, and construction. The OPC reveals the enthusiasm of producing something somehow ancient and futuristic that rechristens the landscape of our trivial aesthetic contemporaneity and carnivalesque visitor experiences.

The iconicity of the tower calls to mind the classic 17^th century Maltese De Redin watchtowers, among others still in use during WW2 across European borders, whose skin and sinew still shape vigilance and sovereignty. One reasonable question about the Obama Center tower is a dispute between the interior and exterior where the exterior form plays by its own rules. While that may be why some find it unorthodox it’s really because the interior is tasteful and disarming while the exterior is intrepid and resolute. A formal debate may be a modernist rule breaker but only in the spirit of avant-gardism. Welcome to Chicago where details like this matter.

The Center becomes a capstone of a protracted local history based in part on progressivist art and architecture theory and another on the restrictions of urban geography. The Midway Studios of Lorado Taft and subsequently the University of Chicago art department faced the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the event which established Chicago as the new industrial, economic, and cultural center, and fastest growing city in the world. If the World’s Fair celebrated the young city’s world-class economic status it can also be said to have inaugurated the South Side as the obligatory origin of its world-famous art, design, and music cultures. Paradoxically, Obama and the other subjects of the president’s center now occupy the grounds on which they would have not been welcome to exhibit 103 years ago. The “arc of the moral universe,” truly, on both counts.

Thanks to my learned colleague Patrick Ulrich for conversation and positive vibes.