I visited the Obama Presidential Center...
A reassessment of my initial criticisms
The Transamerica Pyramid may be one of the beloved symbols of San Francisco today, but it was not always so. When the once-famous and now-forgotten architect William Pereira revealed its design in 1969, it was pilloried.
His tapering tower was nicknamed the “splendid splinter” by some and “Pereira’s prick” by potty-mouthed others. The most violent response was the California politician who said it would “rape the skyline of San Francisco.”
The reviews were savage. In The Washington Post, a critic wrote that, “tastes change. But not the taste of tastelessness,” and called it “hideous nonsense” and “a second-class world’s fair space needle.” The Chronicle’s critic dubbed it “authentic architectural butchery” and then wheeled out some top-notch snobbery to finish it off, griping that “this building would even be wrong in Los Angeles, where it was hatched, or in Las Vegas, where it belongs, or in Dallas, where buildings vie for attention.”
“This is antisocial architecture at its worst,” cried The Los Angeles Times.
Why do I bring this up?
I wrote a pretty harsh piece a couple of months ago about the designs of the Obama Presidential Center, and yesterday I managed to tour it in person. Despite going to tour it with an open mind, and despite being impressed by its interior and the ambition of the campus as a whole, the appeal of the tower’s design still utterly eludes me.
So if you read this column and think I’m cynical, or nuts, or missing its appeal, know that in 1977, just a few years after the Transamerica Tower was completed, The New York Times ran a mea culpa: “Transamerica Building: What Was All the Fuss About?” And perhaps that will be true of the Obama Center.
Then again, the Tour Montparnasse, which also pushed aesthetic boundaries, has been the most hated building in Paris since its unveiling. (My favorite part of the New York Times feature in which they had star architects defend hated buildings is that the best Daniel Liebeskind could muster for the Tour was: “I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents.” It’s that ugly.)
In my column, I took three main issues with the design of Obama’s tower:
It was aesthetically displeasing. A “tumescent shorn obelisk … redolent of a siege tower in Lord of the Rings … its attempt at something sculptural fails, summoning merely an acknowledgement that it is, in fact, a shape. Despite breaking from its surroundings both in form and style, it is inert, pulled down by its adherence to some aesthetic sensibility I will never be able to crack.”
One of its central design twists—Obama’s Selma speech carved onto two facades—was an unreadable folly.
It represented the worst of what has become a gross tradition for a democracy in these presidential libraries.
Before I dive into how those critiques stood up in person, I think it’s only fair to acknowledge what I loved when I visited.
The first is that the interior is breathtaking. The materials and their implementation are top-notch (I am obsessed with the chainmail-esque wall panels on the ground floor). End-grain parquet floors, walls made of wood carved like rippling theater curtains, and a wonderful harmony of concrete, metal, and glass throughout. The artwork is worth a visit alone and is so well placed and lit that it puts most major museums to shame. (While I love that the statue at the entrance is of both Obamas, it follows a trend of modern bronze statues looking slightly off because it chooses to have them smiling. Teeth never look good rendered in bronze.)
The experience of touring it is a slick operation that impeccably tells the tale of American progressivism and the Obamas’ place in it. Nearly everybody I chatted with that day felt the center was this beautiful escape to a different time, one that, for them, felt hopeful and bright.
It’s hard to summon outrage when everybody inside is visibly loving it.
I particularly enjoyed reading about and looking at photographs of their early Chicago years, and often found myself Googling progressive figures they worked with or were inspired by. I got chills watching clips of his seminal speeches and debate performances. The dresses of Mrs. Obama were a fun highlight. And the views from the top-floor skybox are extraordinary.
The larger campus, with its extensive gardens I am keen to see mature, public library, an incredible playground, and basketball courts, are a real testament to what the Obamas have always said they want their legacy to be.
Unfortunately, I can’t help but look at that tower and think it is the exact opposite.
No matter your political persuasion, the Obama story is a remarkable one. And as the videos and speeches throughout the exhibit halls remind you, his presidency constantly promoted a mindset of openness, hope, and togetherness—opening up the White House to groups that never dreamed of it, reaching out to countries long ignored or vilified, and so on.
A near-windowless tower of gray stone says the inverse.
In person, it looms less large than photos, and thus less obnoxious. But I still can’t grasp anything pleasing about its appearance. It is also eerily reminiscent of Marcel Breuer’s Whitney (now Sotheby’s). The slabs of granite cladding, though of different shades, are similarly veined and marble-like. Even the small windows on the top of the north and eastern faces are almost exactly the inverse of those twisted trapezoidal windows punched out of the Breuer’s facades. There is a similar jutting-out-edness.
It’s a strange parallel, because Breuer was going for isolation and monasticism. Theoretically, the Obamas and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects were going for “hands coming together to hold a lantern of light.”
Which brings me to something that has irritated me tremendously about the response to criticisms of this building, particularly of its illegible speech carved into its top third.
There is a tendency in writing and speaking about contemporary architecture that confuses reason with result. An architect will say some conceptual thing about their design, and people will repeat that as if that’s the end of the matter. But rarely do we ask: did it accomplish that? And perhaps more importantly, should that have been the priority at all?
Reading interviews with the architects, I’m reminded of that scene in La Grande Bellezza where the protagonist, a newspaper columnist, is questioning a performance artist. She speaks in contemporary performance art pablum, and when he presses her on one detail—what she means by “vibration”—her answers grow ever more nonsensical and hysterical before she demands a higher-caliber journalist.
So, for instance, outlets keep repeating that the tower is meant to show “hands coming together to hold a lantern of light”? But does it? No? Maybe at night? If we judged a public monument solely by how it looked at night, then Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial in DC would be a hotspot. What person sees the hands holding a lantern without having been told?
“It’s intentionally more sculptural,” said Williams in an interview, “and we’re able to do that because, in fact, it didn’t require that many windows.”
Again, I’d ask, why are we assuming it doesn’t require windows? A place without windows signals secretive or closed off, no? And what is it a sculpture of?
But what about whether a tower was the right idea in the first place?
“It actually says ‘look at me’ and that’s intentional,” Williams told CNN.
Why is it a good thing for a presidential library to say “look at me”? What does that say about us as a country?
Interestingly, Williams said in an interview: “We didn’t think of a tall tower [in the early stages] … We thought the president was more modest, and it should be a more modest solution.” But President Obama requested it.
This leads to point 3 (we can come back to point 2), which is the concept of the presidential library itself.
The further we get from FDR’s original library, the more propagandistic they get, and this $850 million iteration is no exception. You will not see any grappling with various tough points in the presidency. No self-examination of the healthcare rollout, the Afghan war, the Arab Spring, or criticisms of the response to the financial crisis. No matter how joyful the people walking its halls were, I cannot escape the icky feeling of a man building an Ozymandian tower devoted, essentially, to himself. Not to mention tickets cost $30 for adults and $23 for children 3 to 11.
Walking the rest of the campus with its gardens, public library, and court, I found myself wishing that this was all he’d built and what a powerful statement that would have been.
When I first wrote about the tower, it was largely in response to outrage and mockery online when it became apparent from photographs that Obama’s Selma speech, which spanned the top third of two facades, was unreadable. The typeface chosen means you can’t tell the difference between I, T, and L, or E and F. It also chose a sizing for its letters that cuts off words partway at the line break, a sort of escalation of poetic enjambment that wouldn’t be so painful were it not for the fact that you can only see one facade at a time.
Fast Company got hold of the designer of the carved speech, Michael Bierut.
“One of the key questions I asked at the beginning was, are people supposed to read this? … Is legibility the primary goal here? Do we want people to be able to stand on the ground, look up at this tower, and read those words? And that was discussed on the client end, and the answer came back, ‘No, it should have the promise of meaning, it should be decipherable, everything should be spelled right and it should make sense.’”
I was told in comments, direct messages, and in person that I was being too literal, that I essentially just “didn’t get design.” I’m sorry, but that’s all nonsense. What, if anything, should we do with a speech except hear or read it? Also, are we just supposed to nod and not notice the contradiction between saying people don’t need to read those words, and “it should make sense.”
Later in the interview comes the real doozy.
“Just as a million people go to the Lincoln Memorial, some of them will stand and read every word of the second inaugural; some people will just admire the statue in the building and kind of take it in, and a couple of words will jump out, but not the whole thing … It’s in that tradition that I think we were operating.”
But you cannot actually read many of the individual words on the Obama tower! And what an asinine way to reduce the effects of Lincoln’s speeches.
One of my favorite things to do in Washington when I’m feeling dispirited is to stroll or bike down to the Mall and scale the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Gettysburg Address. I am never alone doing so. The sentences are so powerful, so relevant, and always trigger an emotional response.
“Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” reads the part that always gets me. “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
Imagine if some future person could go for a run or bike ride to the base of this tower looking for inspiration, and could have found it by reading the speech. Instead, they’ll spend their time wondering what “vned” “nually” and “re” mean. Should they assume that those words so carefully written and spoken by Obama meant nothing?
Just admit that, whether it was a screw-up or intentional like they’re continuing to claim, the disembodied and indecipherable text doesn’t work, and stop trying to gaslight us into thinking we’re merely screeching troglodytes who can’t comprehend next-level design.
How did this come about?
Originally, the plan was for completely inscrutable text. Billie Tsien told the Chicago Sun-Times that the building was inspired by a rock she found on the floor of a souvenir shop in Aksum, Ethiopia. “It fits in the palm of your hand,” she said. “The letters carved are unintelligible—maybe Amharic? Not sure if it was 100 years old or 10 days old, but it was mysterious and felt as if it carried a message.”
Everything clicked into place when I read that line. Perhaps that’s why so much of it grates. On the outside, it’s this mysterious monument that closes itself off from the physical world. You cannot see into it, and you literally cannot understand what it is saying. Inside, it’s a time capsule that also closes itself off, allowing visitors to transport themselves to an era detached from the one raging outside. For a couple of hours, you live out your nostalgic political fantasy, free from complications.
I appreciate that this is exactly what so many might want right now. For me, it just wasn’t enough.
OTHER REVIEWS OF THE CENTER
New York Times: Obama Center’s Two Sides: A Lovely Park and a Forbidding Tower
AP: In a city with an iconic skyline, the Obama presidential museum aims to reshape Chicago architecture
Chicago Sun-Times: No tower of glower: Obama Center and its maligned signature building are worthy of consideration
Curbed (New York Magazine): We Didn’t Need an Obama Megalith The new presidential center has an ambitious community agenda, a generous spirit, and a dismayingly cold granite core.
Washington Post: The Obama Center opens as a time warp to an old political order
The Guardian: ‘Like a Klingon prison’: inside Barack Obama’s audacious, near-windowless, $850m presidential library
Fast Company: The Obama Presidential Center is more than its granite tower
The Times: ‘You say bold, I say audacious’: inside Obama’s divisive presidential library
The original plan for SF’s TransAmerica Tower was 60 stories/1000 ft, which would have been totally out of scale in the skyline. After pushback from the community, the tower got a haircut to a less-obnoxious 48 floors/850 feet.
I think your remarks about the speech being unreadable are spot on. It should be on the building, but maybe a large plaque on an outer wall, or engraved into the walls at 2nd and 3rd story height makes more sense and would present the message better. I think the building would be more striking and visually appealing if they made the corner with the speech a wall of windows. The outside walls do call out for projection. I'm not sure if they're doing that, but it would be pretty awesome.