Forget Louis Sullivan’s definition of the tall building as “a proud and soaring thing” — there’s probably never been a building as tall as the Obama Presidential Center that seems so earthbound. The mostly solid 225-foot-tall tower’s forms are unusual. And they seem to have been driven by their very atypical client.

“(President Barack 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,’” architect Billie Tsien recalls. “Anybody in practice, their stomach always slightly clinches, because you know, this person’s going to try to be the architect.”

But both Tsien and her partner, Tod Williams, describe a very involved Obama who really understood the drawings and models throughout the project’s lengthy gestation period. “He made many good suggestions, and he made a few not so good suggestions,” Tsien says.

For all the recent noise about the center’s frankly unusual tower, there’s at least one thing that’s downright conventional, even old-fashioned: It’s a contemporary take on the traditional treasure box museum — a form popular throughout the 19th and 20th centuries that created mostly solid and protective structures that express their architectural seriousness through the decoration of mostly unwindowed facades. While not particularly tall, the older structures for the Art Institute, Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry are all of this distinct type.

Williams and Tsien’s initial proposal depicted a low-lying campus complex with a museum, a forum and a library.

Obama coaxed the architects to create an iconic element, which was the genesis of the tower.

But Williams explains that he was not about to engage the prototypical Chicago high-rise — namely, a steel-framed glass-clad structure. “The building is not one layer on another, stacked tall,” Williams says, describing the quintessential Chicago tall building since Sullivan and his contemporaries. “It is largely a solid structure that feels earthbound, to and from earth.”

The tower’s structure is principally concrete, although little is seen of the material throughout the building. While concrete was important to economically achieving some of the building’s signature nips and tucks, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, or TWBTA, never considered exposing the material. “(Stone) has the ability to change character and feeling,” Williams says. “And concrete won’t do that.”

TWBTA originally considered marble for the exterior, but discovered local contractors were skittish about the classic monumental stone based on its infamous failure on the Aon Building. Williams scouted granites, settling on a stone he found in New Hampshire. “When I saw a quarry that had an 80-foot sheer face like this, I said, ‘that’s the stone,’” he says. Actually, two stones, both from the same quarry — one with variated patterns that clads the museum and its less dramatic kin that’s on the forum and library.

“This stone is very different from any other stone we’ve ever used,” Tsien explains. “It becomes extremely figured (when it’s wet). When it dries out, it’s a little bit more sedate, but it’s still pretty figurative.” Every building looks a bit different as sun and clouds are always changing throughout the day, but the architect’s material choices have rendered the presidential center as a particularly moody structure — which is a bit odd given its patron’s famously even temper.

The initial tower designs depict a tower that was squatter in proportions, had no text on the facades, and featured larger stone panels than the built version. “(Obama) spoke of Brâncuși as being a sculptor who he liked,” Tsien recalls. The architect talks about the sculptor’s interest in elemental forms: “When it’s finally finished, you can’t add anything, you can’t subtract anything, it is a thing unto itself.”

The tower’s distinctive shape was the result of an iterative process that produced at least three dozen different variations. But it’s clear from discussions with the architects that the more sculptural approach to the tower was driven by Obama and was not their typical design process.

Unfortunately, the client was not available to discuss his role.

Crawling atop the west and south facades are 5-foot-tall letters cast in an ultra-high-performance concrete. The text began as an ornamental flourish proposed by the architects at the top of the tower with no fully legible words. It evolved into the 103-word excerpt from Obama’s speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches.

It’s not just the tower’s exterior that’s odd; this characteristic extends to its inside as well. Architects generally position a tower’s core at the center to maximize open space per floor and provide structural economy. But the OPC’s tower has two cores that provide circulation efficiencies throughout the museum and create a visual opening from the northeast to the southwest corner at each of the non-museum floors. And for a structure that seems so solid on the skyline, the interiors on these floors at the top and bottom of the tower are strikingly bright and daylit.

Surprisingly, the lower floors of the tower pack some vertical drama. A lower-level courtyard at the southwest corner of the building provides a pleasant outdoor space adjacent to the cafe and promises to be popular in nice weather. The adjacent three-story-tall indoor space is home to Mark Bradford’s monumental “City of the Big Shoulders,” an ode to the South Side that’s one of the more effective art pieces produced specifically for the OPC.

The centerpiece of many visitors’ trip to the presidential center will be the four museum floors that occupy the central section of the tower. Architecturally these floors are virtually identical with the solid exterior walls providing the exhibit designers with a relatively blank slate for their installations. An open well spatially connects these floors at the northeast corner — an attempt to unify the four levels that’s more vertiginous than effective.

Sitting atop the tower is the Sky Room, which can come as a bit of a surprise because its long horizontal windows are obscured behind the exterior screen of text. The views here are intentional — showcasing Chicago neighborhoods that were integral to the Obamas’ histories. And the 5-foot-tall letters create an unusual screen between you and the city below.

 

TWBTA has always been known for its elegant and intriguing architectural finishes. The north and east walls of the Sky Room feature hand-carved wood panels that demonstrate this talent. The deep folds of the wood help with the acoustics of the space while providing an elegant counterpoint to the broad windows on the facing walls. And the soaring plastered pyramidal ceiling provides a dramatic vertical flourish. Hand-carved wood benches allow visitors to rest at the conclusion of their rise through the tower to its summit in this space.

Their OPC scheme required a radical remake of a large swath of Jackson Park often attributed to Frederick Law Olmsted. But landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh recalls his approach beginning with the initial competition-winning design. “That corner couldn’t have been a less inspiring moment in an Olmsted park,” he says. “This is a highly degraded piece of parkland and an opportunity for this to be reinvigorated.” The prolific Brooklyn-based landscape architect is no stranger to Chicago, having designed The 606 and Maggie Daley Park some years after he graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

To the designer’s credit, you won’t see parking, as the 400-car garage is discretely tucked under the park. And you don’t enter the campus from parking directly into a building. “We have to walk out through the landscape and experience the land in order to enter the building,” he says. “There’s this nice kind of meander,” Van Valkenburgh says.

The single design move that probably won Williams and Tsien the project was that they proposed a series of several structures that form a campus. As completed, there are three primary structures organized around a series of sunken courtyards — a Chicago Public Library branch, the forum and the museum. The more modest Home Court facility designed by Moody Nolan lies at the southern end of the 19.3-acre site.

Of the six distinct courtyards, five of them are located on the lower “garden” level. It’s these five subterranean spaces where Williams, Tsien and Van Valkenburgh operated at their most collaborative. “We have done three projects where the building significantly invests in part of the architecture being underground … imagining landscape spaces that bring phenomena and light and air into those lower spaces so that they’re not unpleasant to be in,” Van Valkenburgh says.

Two of the courtyards lie at opposite corners of the museum tower, two along the southern face of the forum, and one within the library branch. Each is smartly landscaped and most feature site-specific artwork. Calling the lower floor the garden level might seem like some artful misdirection, but the amount of daylight that these features provide to the subterranean level is significant. They’re successful enough that you’re seldom aware that you’re one floor underground.

The south end of the plaza is occupied by the new branch of the Chicago Public Library. The main reading room enjoys ample natural light through north-facing floor-to-ceiling windows and is highlighted by a stunning 70-foot-long mural by Aliza Nisenbaum called “Reading Circles/Weaving Dreams/Seeding Futures.” It’s reminiscent of the murals that were once staples of public buildings, including libraries, during the Works Progress Administration era.

The Presidential Reading Room features thousands of noncirculating books personally chosen (or so it is claimed) by the president and Michelle Obama. It’s probably the most serene space in the entire OPC complex and it’s programmatically reminiscent of the Toni Morrison Reading Room in Lorain, Ohio — a space conceived by the writer shortly after she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in 1993.

While the museum will likely be the greatest draw, it’s the forum that is the OPC’s literal and metaphoric heart. Located at the center of the broad public plaza facing Stony Island Avenue, its 299-seat auditorium and other meeting rooms will host many of the Obama Foundation’s activities, including its offices. The forum is a building that would be at home on any college campus. The lobby spills out onto the plaza and promises a pleasant place to hang out.  At the garden level, a long wide corridor runs the length of the building and visually links courtyards at either end. Despite the surprising light, there is a bit of that anonymous airport feel to the long wide corridor that links the library and museum through the forum one level below grade. These important programmatic spaces are part of an interior world unto itself — where one could be almost anywhere rather than in this very specific place in Chicago.

“For some people it will feel monumental and I’m not sorry that it’s monumental,” Tsien says. “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,” Tsien says. “It’s their monument.”

“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 says. “The people deserve that monument, so I’m not sorry.”

There will always be something profoundly odd about the windowless — by design — exhibition spaces occupying a large swath of the tower. This isn’t really what Sullivan had in mind when he dictated “form follows function.”

The image of the tower is clearly not meant to be easy, in the same way that American democracy isn’t easy in the 21st century. The complex is surprising in a way that’s similar to Obama’s political success. It’s different, it’s unexpected, it’s inspiring, and it suggests new possibilities. And it seems to be indicative of the thoughtful and extensive process that has resulted in these particular — and peculiar — forms.

I’ve written before about my enduring affection for Henry Hobson Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store that stood at Adams Street between Franklin and Wells from 1887 to 1930. It was a bold and brawny stone-clad structure whose then-unusual forms inspired Sullivan and the Auditorium Theatre. These late-19th century structures were among the earliest buildings that posited a specifically American architecture that took its cues from the forms and materials of the then-young nation. Another, lesser-known structure that Richardson designed just a bit earlier is the Ames Monument in Albany County, Wyoming — a pyramidal pile of stones that marks its place in the vast open landscape of the American West in a timeless way.

The Obama center’s tower is iconic in a similar manner, a unique piece that embodies an exceptional achievement in time while offering inspiration — and yes, hope — for the future.

Edward Keegan writes about architecture for the Tribune’s Opinion section. His work is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. 

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