Former President Barack Obama reportedly pushed to make his Chicago-based presidential center far beyond his original vision, which made at least one of its architects “uneasy.”
Obama’s demands made the architect “uneasy,” adding more complications to the planned $850 million Obama Presidential Center, a mammoth, granite-clad complex in Jackson Park in Chicago, Illinois.
Tod Williams, one of the architects, said that Obama urged designers to “up our ante” from the presidential center’s earliest designs. The push for increasing the scale of the presidential center created tension, he said.
“He was saying we should up our ante,” Williams told the New Yorker. He added that the continued pressure to up the scale made him uneasy.
“Another time, he drew on one of my drawings, made a strong mark, which indicated that he didn’t think I was being bold enough. Those little things sting. But they also moved everything forward,” Williams continued.
The Daily Mail reported:
What began as a more understated campus concept soon evolved into something far more imposing: a 225-foot granite tower, nicknamed by critics as the ‘Obamalisk,’ dominating a 19-acre site in one of Chicago’s most historic parklands.
Obama himself challenged the architects to think beyond traditional civic design – at one point invoking modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi as inspiration.
Williams remarked, “That really cranked it up for us. Oh, my God, this is serious s***.’ He wanted us to do something that we had not done before, and that is hard. He didn’t let it rest.”
Obama told the architects to experiment with alternative shapes, and they eventually came up with 25 different designs.
Williams admitted that the final design is “very much a product of his vision as well as ours.”
The Obama presidential center’s cost was originally estimated to be $300 million, but has continued to skyrocket to about $850 million, fueled by “rising construction costs … and lavish design elements.”
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