At the New Obama Presidential Center, a Proposed Utopia of Hope and Change

Hope and Change has come to Chicago’s South Side—or at least twenty acres of it. On Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public to wrestle with the current political age and its position—culturally, geographically, economically, and architecturally—within the city that it has made home.

There were other places that the Obama Foundation considered: Washington, DC, Honolulu, West Harlem, and North Lawndale, on Chicago’s West Side. Chicago’s South Side, however, was perhaps the most logical choice. It’s here that both Barack and Michelle Obama, who met while working at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, began their ascension into a political dynasty, a story that can be told largely within a two-mile radius of the Obama Presidential Center. Michelle grew up in a bungalow on South Euclid Avenue in South Shore, and after a memorable first kiss at a Baskin-Robbins on East 53rd Street in Hyde Park, and a wedding at the historic South Shore Cultural Center, Barack and Michelle would begin their life together. They eventually settled into East View Park, a courtyard apartment community in Hyde Park, before upgrading to a Georgian revival home in Kenwood after Barack Obama’s election to the United States Senate in 2004. West of the Obama Presidential Center is the University of Chicago, where both Michelle and Barack were employed before their tenures as First Lady and President. Beyond that radius, on the Far South Side—closer to Indiana than the Loop—is the part of Chicago that undergirded the political organizing work that Barack Obama performed alongside residents of West Pullman, Riverdale, Roseland, and Altgeld Gardens.

The City of Chicago also believed that the Obama Presidential Center should be on the South Side. In 2015, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel—and Barack Obama’s former chief of staff—was willing to move heaven and earth to ensure that the Obama Foundation’s preferred site, a slender piece of parkland at Midway Plaisance and Stony Island Avenue, would be made available. This location was initially suggested by the University of Chicago, even though the university lacked jurisdiction over the Chicago Park District-owned site.

Despite a wealth of vacant and underutilized land that the Obama Presidential Center could have—and, I might argue, should have—been built on, Jackson Park was the site that the Obama Foundation desired. Jackson Park is a large urban park designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, who also designed New York City’s Central Park, among other groundbreaking public park designs. The park straddles the neighborhoods of Hyde Park, Woodlawn, and South Shore, and its easternmost boundary is Lake Michigan. Established in 1871 as a part of Chicago’s South Parks system, its grounds were supercharged in 1893 as the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition. It was on these grounds that Chicago would clarify its architectural language: one that would influence how the city would design and build in perpetuity. While the former Palace of Fine Arts (now the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry) is the only major building still extant from the World’s Fair era, Jackson Park still retains its landscape design overall, including lagoons and ponds, its connection to the Midway Plaisance, and its relationship to the lake. As wealth and investment shifted away from the South Side, and the Great Migration made the surrounding neighborhoods increasingly more Black and less wealthy, Jackson Park, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, experienced disinvestment, while its park counterparts on the North Side, like Lincoln Park, benefitted from their whiter, wealthier locations. Proponents of the Obama Presidential Center Jackson Park site saw an opportunity to capitalize on the halo effect of resources that the Obama Presidential Center would bring that the Chicago Park District could not provide. The Chicago Park District, the Department of Planning and Development, City Council, and later, the Illinois Legislature, would all fall in line to provide the Obama Foundation, a powerful private nonprofit, with parts of a historic landscape that had been held in the public trust for 150 years. This action initiated a series of lawsuits brought forth by Protect our Parks, a citizen group challenging a powerful coalition in a city that, in large part, considers Barack and Michelle Obama to be a beloved part of its narrative.

That narrative implied a level of trust given to the Obamas that splintered as the Obama Foundation doubled down on its “for the community” language while abstaining from any real efforts as a responsible neighbor beyond what it wanted and what it wished to control. As the lawsuits made their way through the court system, delaying the project’s groundbreaking by years, the Obama Foundation began quietly manipulating the site’s landscape, as if it knew that the outcome would ultimately be in their favor. Each lawsuit would fail, but they would highlight an unshakable undercurrent of skepticism. On Chicago’s South Side, public and private initiatives are consistently touted as being “transformative” despite their imprecise tailoring, lack of engagement, or likelihood of failure. After decades of disinvestment, urban renewal, environmental racism, and bad political actors, the South Side has learned that the rest of Chicago largely expects it to practice gratitude for whatever it gets. Despite this, the Obama Presidential Center was projected as being a different kind of asset. It would bring true, lasting investment to the surrounding communities of South Shore, Woodlawn, and beyond. It would initiate a flow of resources to public parks, strengthen transportation and infrastructure, drive the hyper-local economy, and make life generally better for residents.

Stepping on to the newly completed and beautiful campus of the Obama Presidential Center, even as a local skeptic, it is easy to believe all of this is true. Within it, the grass is truly greener, as freshly planted landscaping rolls over hills and berms, squishing under your feet. Trees are young and healthy, paths are tidy, and the signage is sharply designed and clear. Colorful, cheery playground equipment is new and clean and looks enticing enough for this local skeptic to try out a powerful set of slides, and crawl inside a big wooden dragonfly. This landscape, which includes a Great Lawn, playground, and formal gardens, is set amongst the multiple buildings on campus that, on its north end, house the museum tower, a Chicago Public Library branch, and the Forum Building, designed around a formal plaza. Further south, beyond the playground and the landscape, is Home Court, a multipurpose recreation-oriented building with an NBA regulation-sized basketball court. Each building is connected via a series of winding paths that make travelling between them a pleasant journey. Plazas, terraces, and gardens are named for the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, John Lewis, and Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham.

The Obama Presidential Center campus doesn’t look or feel like anything else in Chicago, and the city hasn’t seen anything like it since Millennium Park opened in the Loop in 2004. Like the attraction that Millennium Park has become, it will undoubtedly capture attentions and imaginations, and draw people from all over the world. Inside the campus of the Obama Presidential Center, the Obama Foundation has created a kind of utopia, particularly as so few new things come to the South Side of this high quality. Instead of its location at the terminus of the University of Chicago, it could be an attraction on the National Mall in Washington, DC, comfortable amongst the Smithsonians, National Galleries and Museums, memorials, and monuments. Chicago has these kinds of attractions as well, and each is banking on the notion that the Obama Presidential Center will have an overarching halo effect on their ability to draw visitors—and that none will be drawn away from the substantial attention that the Obama Presidential Center will capture.

The Obama Presidential Center campus weaves together a number of designs, designers, and environments. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects is largely responsible for the campus’s architecture, while Michael Van Valkenburg Associates Inc. has designed the landscape. The museum tower is the loudest architectural moment overall. According to Williams and Tsien, the museum tower draws from a structural, humanoid form; hands coming together. Yet according to the eye, the building is an unfamiliar, unreadable form of textures and randomly spaced apertures.

A quote drawn from Barack Obama’s 2015 speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches is rendered in human-scale letters at the building’s corner by Pentagram. Is this some kind of ornament? If it is, it should be legible from the ground, yet its position and kerning make it appear as an architectural screen made of letter salad. The quote when read in full is inspiring and encouraging, but it is nearly impossible to discern from any vantage point. Imagine a third grader, standing atop a metal slide emerging from the side of a giant wooden duck within the playground reading what she sees out loud.

Within the tower is the Obama Presidential Center Museum, tucked within an interior of smoothly applied concrete, brushed metals, and warm woods. In a series of vertical galleries are artwork and exhibits that provide an exploration of historical events that inspired the Obama legacy. Some of these explorations are digital—such as a multistory, large-scale video projection—and some are traditional. The height and shape of the tower make the most sense once you are inside it, and the interior verticality makes it a unique space that allows for many successful architectural and interpretive moments. There is a lot to see here; it is interactive and fresh. The museum includes a remarkable array of collection items that include picket signs, buttons representing the global and cross-cultural reach of his campaigns, and a pocket watch given to Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin by Martin Luther King Jr. It is easy to linger in front of a superb selection of Michelle Obama’s colorful dresses and shoes, or a series of dioramas depicting rooms in the Obama White House. The museum also includes a full-scale replica of the Obama Presidency Oval Office. The intent of this recreation is to assist you, the visitor, in imagining what you might be able to achieve as you sit at the desk of the United States’ first Black president. Yet, it is impossible to not compare this iteration of the Oval Office under Obama, muted and tranquil, with the current Trump Oval Office, gilded and jarring. On the uppermost floor is the Sky Room, giving visitors an opportunity to see Chicago’s skyline, Lake Michigan, and the city’s sides and angles.

The museum tower aspires to be amongst Chicago’s skyline and its legacy of unique skyscrapers. Yet its distance from downtown—nearly seven miles away—and even its separation from the skyscrapers of Hyde Park and South Shore, make its attempt at this validation awkward. Much of the negative public discourse around the museum tower’s design focuses on the elements that it doesn’t share with the skyscraper that it wishes to be. It has limited windows and does not draw from familiar forms in Chicago. This tension, that museums do not need windows, but tall buildings become an uneasy sight without them, is one that is resolved when the museum is experienced from within, and within the minds of architects and designers. However, it will never be resolved within the public discourse, and it’s unlikely that it will ever overcome any number of its unflattering (but catchy) nicknames. Unique architecture—whether it is a success or a failure—has a tendency to bring out the haters. Yet in this case, the hate is warranted.

The museum tower loses much of its uniqueness when one is aware of its older, blockier cousin, the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts, built in 2012 for the University of Chicago and also designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Inspired not by hands coming together, but by the flat plains of the Midwest and the towers of Chicago, both buildings come to similar conclusions.

Other buildings set amongst this plaza, also designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, are more successful, perhaps due to their simplicity. The Forum Building and the Chicago Public Library Branch share a materiality that makes them feel comfortable and contemporary. Surfaces are clad in cool, streaky grey granite with bronze detailing both inside and out. The buildings blend into the landscape as they move east, making them invisible from outside of the campus boundaries, within Jackson Park. In the Forum building is the Hadiya Pendleton Atrium, with artwork created by Theaster Gates, who is a fixture in architecture, art, and development within the neighborhoods surrounding the Obama Presidential Center. The Obama Presidential Center Branch of the Chicago Public Library is adjacent to the Forum Building. Assessing it in terms of its architecture, the design is nice, and the construction of a new library is certainly never a bad thing, the tiny library, complete with a Presidential Reading Room, is just a folly to satiate a sense of civic partnership.

The Obama Presidential Center was originally presented to the public as the fourteenth library within the federally managed and funded Presidential Library system, founded in 1939 by the National Archives and Records Administration. The Obama Foundation broke from this agency in 2017, so the National Archives does not have a presence at the Obama Presidential Center. The official Barack Obama Presidential Library is located in a nondescript governmental office building in College Park, Maryland. The presence of a Chicago Public Library branch on the Obama Presidential Center grounds allows some technical leeway in terms of those that might still—or always—refer to the Obama Presidential Center as the “Obama Library.” Yes, there is a library here, but it is not a presidential library, and even as a branch of the Chicago Public Library system, it falls short. Physically, the library lacks the public space that is commonplace in other Chicago Public Library branches, and it’s difficult to imagine where exactly in its small footprint programming might occur. At the time of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, the library isn’t noted as a branch library on the Chicago Public Library website.

Home Court, located at the south end of the campus, is designed by Moody Nolan, who came to the Obama Presidential Center project in 2019, later in the design process. It was Moody Nolan’s responsibility to clarify the use case for a building they refer to as a “Swiss army knife” that would be space for programming that is both messy and refined, but all in regarding community activation. Home Court is sharply designed and nicely finished throughout. Home Court’s function as a gesture is a beautiful but loaded one, especially as basketball, and public basketball courts, are all too slowly moving out of decades of excessive police enforcement and poor infrastructure. While many Chicago-based designers were involved in the Obama Presidential Center at a lesser scale, unlike Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Michael Van Valkenburg Associates Inc., Moody Nolan has an office and a big presence in Chicago.

The Obama Presidential Center strives toward many lofty goals: civic partnerships, community improvement, and transformative change. Some of these intentions are made clear—the campus is free, open to the public, and the hours of the grounds mirror those of the parkland that surrounds it. But it becomes clear that those goals are only achieved by the Obama Foundation within the campus. And how, exactly, will the campus itself achieve them?

The civic realm put in an enormous amount of work to roll out the red carpet for the Obama Presidential Center, but as it opens to the public, “hope and change” hasn’t been implemented in advance of the Obama Presidential Center’s opening outside of the campus. Some of these shortcomings are inconveniences, and might take time, but with the project delayed for years there has been plenty of time already. Others are the result of civic failures.

One only needs to attempt to cross Stony Island Avenue to face this reality. The Illinois Department of Transportation has jurisdiction over the stretch of roadway in front of the Obama Presidential Center campus, and while the roadway was repaved and dressed with a grassy median, the streetscape is unfriendly towards pedestrians. Crosswalks are limited along a large stretch of the Obama Presidential Center that fronts Stony Island Avenue, which encourages visitors—and Obama Presidential Center employees—to jaywalk across a four-lane roadway. Less than a half a mile south of the Obama Presidential Center, the roadway becomes an eight-lane, pothole-ridden race track, implying that even the State of Illinois has come to the conclusion that no one who matters will ever travel south of the Obama Presidential Center.

How exactly does one get to the Obama Presidential Center? While the Chicago Transit Authority has increased bus service to the center, the outsized presence of a parking garage on site, and the nature of the streetscape implies that you should drive your own vehicle. If you don’t have one, or are traveling in from out of Chicago, Metra—Chicago’s commuter rail transit system—is also an option, but trains run on a limited basis on weekends and the closest station, at 59^th Street, has no elevators, and has not been improved in advance of the Obama Presidential Center’s opening. There is no Chicago Transit Authority elevated train station nearby, as the City of Chicago demolished the rest of the Green Line Jackson Park Branch east of Cottage Grove in the late 1990s. While bike trails are plentiful within Jackson Park, there is no bike infrastructure on Stony Island Avenue, as the roadway has been improved without bike lanes, let alone the protected ones that it desperately needs.

The Obama Foundation’s acquisition of twenty acres of public parkland was presented as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for improvement upon the rest of Jackson Park’s five hundred and thirty acres. The Chicago Department of Transportation permanently closed Cornell Drive located just east of the Obama Presidential Center and eliminated a section of Cornell south of the campus that fed into Stony Island Avenue at 67^th Street. A section of Marquette Drive feeding into Stony Island was also closed. These improvements also included adding a southbound lane to DuSable Lake Shore Drive to accommodate additional traffic. While some of these improvements add greenspace within Jackson Park and provide pedestrians and cyclists with fewer roadway interactions, these are secondary effects to the primary intention: to make traveling to and from the Obama Presidential Center as easily as possible by car. While construction of the Obama Presidential Center was funded privately, this roadwork was publicly funded.

Various park projects, including roadway improvements, were subject to federal-level environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, as well as consultation under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Whether these reviews, intended to ensure that federal agencies take into consideration the effects their actions—including funding and permitting—will have on a historic place like Jackson Park, the Obama Foundation’s interests—and the trickle-down effect it had on city, state, and federal agencies—guided the process with an invisible hand. The plans sailed through the Chicago Planning Commission and City Council without objection.

Amenities, commerce, transportation, and walkability are concentrated in Hyde Park, north and west of the Obama Presidential Center, and there is no doubt that its arrival will draw people to Hyde Park’s restaurants, shops, and hotels. Will it draw people to Woodlawn and South Shore in the same fashion? It might have if these things existed in higher numbers, but because of disinvestment, liquor moratoriums, building owners pricing commercial spaces for rent at prohibitively high prices, and again, bad political actors, there are very few. The wards surrounding the Obama Presidential Center have a legacy of alderpeople like former 20th Ward alderman Willie Cochran, who went to federal prison for pocketing funds intended to serve his Woodlawn constituents, and former 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston, who attempted—and failed—to downzone a stretch of 71st Street from commercial to residential to exert aldermanic prerogative over the already limited number of new businesses and developments interested in setting up shop in South Shore. South Shore and Woodlawn do have restaurants, but the selection is limited, and they are not located in proximity to anything else that might be walkable. Neither South Shore nor Woodlawn have hotels like Hyde Park—a result of the University of Chicago being located there. In a more shameful move, the Obama Foundation has partnered with Airbnb to launch a series of “Community Tourism Prep Sessions” to help residents make extra income by renting out their homes to guests—even as they are being priced out of the neighborhood. It’s not difficult to imagine a younger and idealistic Barack Obama raging against all of this in his organizing years.

The City of Chicago attempted to ensure that the Obama Presidential Center would bring positive change and implemented multiple programs to protect long-term residents in Woodlawn from displacement. Yet these attempts by the City came years too late, as investors and investment firms began buying up properties in earnest as early as 2018. Multiple programs, including a 2020 anti-displacement ordinance for Woodlawn, a set aside for vacant lots for new affordable housing, a program to preserve existing affordable rentals, home improvement grants, and a Right of First Refusal program to allow renters in Woodlawn to purchase their homes were all great ideas, but each has fallen so short that none have made an impact. Programs like these that seek to protect residents require dedicated staff, funding, and accountability on a long-term basis in order to be successful, and none of them have received it. The Obama Center Housing Ordinance, which passed City Council in September 2025, may fare better—but that too will require accountability. In neighborhoods like Woodlawn and South Shore, these programs may never reach the most vulnerable, as those who are housing-burdened are often burdened elsewhere and are without the time and resources to unlock the potential of these programs.

According to the Obama Foundation, the Obama Presidential Center is projected to attract anywhere from 750,000 to one million visitors each year. Where will they come from? Will they, as the Obama Foundation and its designers suggest, be “from the community”? Will there be book clubs in the Forum Building, gathered around the comfortable chairs? Will children be able to sit and do their homework, making use of the free Wi-Fi? Will Home Court be open for pickup basketball games, or will players arrive to find the hoops retracted and the room full of banquet tables, set for a wedding reception? Will your ability to use these spaces freely be dependent on your race, age, or gender, or how the Obama Presidential Center’s private security perceives you? The appetite for over policing Black people, especially young Black people, in Chicago’s public and private spaces has only increased. The Obama Presidential Center’s friendly and optimistic air and its welcoming approach only goes as far as how it is willing to see people “in the community” as just that, and not a risk to mitigate.

There is an elephant within the Obama Presidential Center’s twenty acres. On a superficial level, the Obama Presidential Center is countering the horrors of Donald Trump’s presidency, which is to its benefit—especially on a national stage and amongst those who are unaware of the complicated local impacts. Its very existence, its message of hope and change, is likely soothing, and perhaps rightfully so, to many of the people who view the Obamas, and the Obama Presidential Center, with a rosy lens. This lens becomes rosier as the Trump presidency continues to roll out ideas, policies, and statements that are laughably ridiculous one day and destructive and traumatizing on a global scale the next. But to believe that what the Obama Presidential Center intended to be is the opposite of what Trump represents, is a shortsighted binary, as this campus will outlast the current political moment. It’s difficult to pin down how the architecture, art, and exhibits intend to address this, if at all. Holding the Obama Presidential Center to high standards, in terms of its design and its influence, is going to produce as much neoliberal backlash as it will serve to embolden conservatives. But the opposite of the Obama Presidential Center’s museum tower is definitely not the United States Triumphal Arch.

The South Side and the neighborhoods that will most feel the effects—both negatively and positively—from the Obama Presidential Center are no strangers to how “hope and change” are often merely buzzwords. Such residents can point to many decades worth of studies, plans, and initiatives that sought to undo the harms of the mid-twentieth century, all put forth under the guise of improvement. While the South Side is not the monolith that it is often presented as, most neighborhoods and their residents are used to projects being presented as “transformational” that are deceptive, fraudulent, or simply never happen. Because the Obama Presidential Center was actually built, it must be different. As there is no precedent, it is difficult to predict exactly how the Obama Presidential Center will be transformative, but without guardrails, an opportunity is created that allows the Obama Presidential Center to be yet another tool to allow capital accumulation to run rampant.

Within the museum tower’s Sky Room, one can look out across the beauty that is the City of Chicago and ponder all of this. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects ask visitors within this room to imagine themselves inside the mind of President Obama, looking out, and through the letters. Like the concept of “hope and change” that the Obama Presidential Center wishes to project, what you see is an abstraction.