The architectural design of the new Barack Obama Presidential Center on the south side of Chicago has triggered criticism from reviewers, reminiscent of the scorn that greeted the opening of Lyndon Johnson’s library in 1971.
Officially opened on June 18 with an outdoor celebration that included former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, the nearly 225,000-square-foot center has been in the planning stage for the better part of a decade, with work beginning in the summer of 2021.
The $850 million project, which houses a library, museum, and conference space, is designed by the New York-based firm of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architect and features an eight-story tower bearing five-foot tall letters spelling out the former president’s “You are America” speech from 2015.
Characterized as the epitome of the Brutalist style, the structure, complains the Economist magazine is a tower of “concrete covered in granite,” looking over other “granite buildings on a granite plaza: grey, grey, and more grey.”
Fox Business and Fox News anchor David Asman has described the Obama Center as a “monstrous insult to architecture.” Lee Bay, architectural critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, said the letters carved into the tower “are tough to read, giving off the lorem ipsum vibes,” referencing the scrambled Latin often used in graphic designs to fill space.
Remarked Michal Kimmelman, architecture critic of the New York Times: the “signature building is a blocky, granite-clad museum tower that the former president wanted to look like four upraised hands. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t see it. I see a boulder in a park.”
Speaking on the program Real Time, television host Bill Maher said the center “looks like something built in Dubai.”
The structure has not been without its defenders. Chris Bird, a structural engineer who designed the portion of the building with the carved letters, said 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.”
Speaking on the program Fox News Digital, Bird said reproducing a portion of a speech as part of the actual structure “is really unprecedented.” He added that “to say it’s a monstrosity is wrong. I would say that it’s a really grand gesture and a bold statement.”
In an interview with the Smithsonian magazine, architect Billie Tsien of the architectural firm that designed the center, said of the curved letters: “I’ve always felt looking through the words that he wrote is like somehow imagining yourself inside the mind of President Obama.”
Ever since the advent of presidential libraries, beginning with the dedication of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in New York’s Hudson Valley in 1941, critics have praised or scorned the architectural pretentions of such efforts.
The Truman and Eisenhower libraries have been praised for their clean modernism, while the Nixon and Reagan libraries have scored points for incorporating Spanish revival elements in their design.
But perhaps the most criticized facility has been the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, which was opened in 1971 in Austin. Designed by the famed architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the building has the most distinctly Brutalist theme of all the presidential libraries.
Referenced by an Associated Press reporter at the time of its opening as a “modern monolithic,” Esquire magazine subsequently characterized the LBJ library as “the ugliest thing we ever saw.”
The criticism has remained constant through the years with the authors of an LBJ biography, Irwin and Debi Unger, in 1999 calling it an “immense charmless, almost windowless white marble cube,” and American Spectator in 2021 offering the following description: a “concrete box with what looks like a dystopian watchtower at the top.”
June 23, 2026
By Garry Boulard
Obama Presidential Center advertisement
