The Obama Presidential Center Is Decidedly Meh

Meh.

If you remember Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait, you know what his new presidential library-that-isn’t-a-library is like: highly unconventional, tediously provocative, instantly forgettable.

On the political right, pictures of the big Battlestar Galactica museum tower are being taken as evidence that the place is a hideously ugly architectural abomination. It’s not that interesting. It’s ugly, but it’s a brutalist stub of a building in Chicago. Complaining about a squat gray tower in Chicago is like b-tching about scones in a bakery. The thing fits into its place, dull and ordinary while it tries to be wild. It’s Barack Obama, an appearance that never grows into substance. Above all, it’s incoherent:

I … uh … what? It sucks, but you can’t really bother to hate it. It merits a shrug, and then you can leave. Why is the right side covered in bumps? Dunno. Why is a long white translucent window gouged into the middle of its face? Dunno. Why is there a notch chunked out of the left side that produces an overhang? Dunno. I spent several hours here today, and I dunno. The building … exists.

The other side has some scribbling.

Let’s capture a close-up for a better look at that window.

Okay?

If you look at the museum in the context of its neighborhood, you can see how it blends in with the other brutalist-ish whatevers.

Concrete chunk, concrete chunk, concrete chunk, concrete chunk. They kind of march in line across the landscape like an Eastern Bloc parade.

The thing sits in a 19-acre park with a quite pleasant-looking playground and some public amenities like picnic areas and basketball courts. There’s a walking path along a lagoon. It’s enjoyable enough, though it’s also a park next to a park, with a playground across the street from a playground. It’s a bold, expensive intervention that doesn’t accomplish much, which is on brand. It looks like the locals haven’t yet noticed that they can do stuff here.

The stuff you can do comes with a pedantic lecture, quite appropriately framed with references to Michelle Obama. I sighed heavily, which was probably not the intended effect.

There’s also a “Women’s Garden,” though I don’t know what message is being conveyed by chaining in the women’s grass.

Bizarrely, the Obama Presidential Center inhabits an urban dead zone. I planned to spend many hours in the neighborhood, watching people come and go and seeing how the place fits into its surroundings, but there’s nothing there. If you don’t get lunch or a cup of coffee inside the Obama Center, you’re not getting lunch or a cup of coffee. Across the street is a University of Chicago park-and-ride lot and some fenced-in apartments. There’s no neighborhood. You can’t run across Stony Island Avenue to shop and hit the restaurants, because they aren’t there. The street name is appropriate, because it’s like visiting an island.

Here’s how it looks from the apartment buildings across the street.

I don’t know, hope and change or something. There’s not much going on there, but the signs all say that it’s very exciting.

Tickets for the museum are sold out for months, and the Obama Foundation greeted my many requests for media access first by saying they’d think about it and then by ignoring me completely. The only detail I’m sorry I missed in the museum is this one, from a local news story on the architectural significance of the site: “You can go through and weep, as many liberals have — the center has even placed tissue boxes in the museum spaces.”

Missing the chance to weep, I stood in line to score a free ticket to the Sky Room, up at the top, where you find yourself encased in Barack Obama’s platitudes.

The windows are covered by words from a speech, and then the ceiling is covered with words from many speeches, so Barack Obama’s words descend toward a collision with Barack Obama’s words. This is a man who thought that his words were very important.

Nice views up here, anyway.

When you visit this view, you’re in the Nelson Mandela Sky Room. When you get lunch, you can eat it in the Oprah Winfrey Courtyard. There’s a branch of the Chicago Public Library on the campus (though you can’t take books out of the building, which would seem to defeat the point of adding a branch of a public library to a neighborhood), and the courtyard outside the local library is the Rachel Carson Courtyard. There’s a Sojourner Truth Program Room, and a Harriet Tubman courtyard. There is, inevitably, public art by Maya Lin, and a land acknowledgment.

If you’re 17 years old and taking AP U.S. History, you know the names of all the rooms and courtyards. The whole place functions as a monument to midwittery, proudly naming the obvious. Walking down a hallway here is like listening to an AWFL name-drop her favorite cultural and historic figures, or majoring in sociology at Vassar. The toilets warn you not to drink from them, by the way.

Please allow me to assure you that I didn’t drink from that toilet. I mean, it’s rainwater, for crying out loud.

Image from the lobby, without comment:

Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii, has degrees from Columbia and Harvard Law, owns homes in Chicago, D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, and Hawaii (again), and taught for a while as an untenured lecturer at the University of Chicago. So his presidential center is across the street from a parking lot for a university where he wasn’t a student and didn’t have a tenure-track teaching job, a not-bad symbol of cosmopolitan placelessness. He’s the man from nowhere. The absence of lively neighborhood amenities seems like a feature. Like the man himself, you can briefly stop by this place before you shrug and move on.