The Obama Foundation announced the Obama Presidential Center campus will open to the public this upcoming Juneteenth weekend.
On June 19, the public will, at long-last, gain access to the 19-acre campus’s playground, museum building, public art installations, landscaped park space, and new Chicago Public Library branch.
The highly-anticipated opening will be a full-weekend affair with events running on June 18 through June 21, including a series of ribbon cuttings, talks, and activations.
A dedication ceremony on the John Lewis Plaza will commence June 18. The Obama Presidential Center will open its doors to the public the next day, June 19. On June 20 and June 21, community celebrations throughout the campus will take place.
President Barack Obama shared in a statement the center’s opening date is a timely one: “It is easy to look around right now and feel like the challenges we face are simply too big. But hope is not about ignoring the hard stuff. It is that thing inside us that insists something better awaits if we are willing to work for it.”
“Here on the South Side of Chicago, hope is getting a permanent home,” President Obama continued. “Starting on June 19, you can visit the Obama Presidential Center. This is not a monument to the past; it is a living destination for people who refuse to accept the status quo. If you feel that way, this is your invitation to join us.”
Artists such as Theaster Gates and Julie Mehrutu have contributed works to the campus’s granite-clad tower by TWBTA that can be seen from afar.
Ahead of its completion, critics have already weighed in on the project. Last month, Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey pointed out the words—excerpted from a speech Obama gave in Selma, Alabama—lining the top of the building are difficult to discern.
Valerie Jarrett, Obama Foundation CEO, noted, “The opening of the ObamaPresidential Center will be a beacon of hope to the world and a place where we hope guests will be inspired to bring change home to their communities.”
Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, the development will contain cultural and educational buildings, including a library, youth centre and museum, framed by landscaped parklands, plazas and performance spaces.
A gallery, music hall and fitness centre will also be built as part of the development.
Zaha Hadid Architects has designed a cultural district along the Zhedong Canal in Hangzhou
Renders of the proposal reveal a trio of sculptural waterside structures flanked with planted outdoor space and steps down to the canal.
A network of bridges and paths are set to weave through the site to connect both sides of the canal and the surrounding city with the new district.
“The Qiantang Bay Central Water Axis creates a series of new landscaped parklands, terraces and gardens along the Zhedong Canal – redefining the former industrial areas of the canal basin into a new green corridor and that weaves through the heart of the city,” the studio said.
The district will include a library, youth centre and museum. Render by Atchain
Zaha Hadid Architects drew on Hangzhou’s terrain for the buildings’ sinuous designs. This includes a glazed library volume, which will be framed with large “inhabitable architectural columns” set to double as storage and reading spaces for visitors.
“Serving as structural support and defining the institutes identity as assembled ‘stones of knowledge’, these columns will accommodate the library’s extensive literary collections and archives,” the studio said.
Externally, the library’s facade will be fitted with folded glass elements to draw natural light into the interior, paired with masonry tiles informed by the region’s jade artistry.
Renders of the building also reveal a shiny underside to the overhanging roof, and curving wooden structures on the interior.
The library will have “inhabitable architectural columns”
Alongside this, the International Youth Centre will have a tiered, terrace-lined structure influenced by the adjacent waterfront.
According to the studio, the building’s facade geometries will extend to its “carved interior”, where auditoriums, studios and event spaces will cater to the city’s students.
Terraces will wrap around the International Youth Centre
Throughout the development, flood-prevention strategies influenced by Hangzhou’s existing sponge-city infrastructure will be implemented.
Landscaping strategies will include permeable surfaces, planted swales and water-retention features for stormwater management.
Curving surfaces that draw you from room to room, soft light, layered glass, walls in white and carpets in gray: perhaps SANAA projects ought to be understood not so much as separate creations than as the far-flung fragments of a single ethereal world. From this view, it seems fitting that the newest such fragment, a museum-cum-library in the Taiwanese city of Taichung, feels remarkably familiar—a continuation, in form, material, and concept, of much that has come before. Almost everything here is recognizable, from the formal conceit, an intersecting array of eight boxy, steel-framed volumes (see the firm’s 2022 addition to the Art Gallery of New South Wales), to the facades, many glazed, all wrapped in silvery aluminum mesh (see the 2008 New Museum in New York City), not to mention the winding ramps and staircases that jump from floor to floor, pavilion to pavilion (see the 2010 Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, among other projects). As a whole, the building takes its place in a longer series of projects that explore the mixing of the rational and irrational—the former represented by the rigor of a precise architectural vocabulary, the latter by the freedom accorded by the informal composition of elements.
In Taichung, this exploration unfolds against a specific urban context—emptiness. Initially designed as part of a 2013 competition held by the city, the building is an early element in the redevelopment of the former Shuinan military airport in western Taichung; today, it stands at the edge of a 165-acre park at the center of the new district, facing out toward vacant parcels of land that the city government is now in the process of selling to developers. Doubtless one of the city’s aims in undertaking the project, and in hiring a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, was to establish the area, bounded to the north by highways and to the west by an aircraft factory, as an attractive place of culture. The plan is by no means unrealistic. Just a few miles south, the Toyo Ito–designed National Taichung Theater (2016) anchors Taichung’s 7th Redevelopment Zone, a newly built district of gleaming offices, department stores, and luxury high-rises.
The majority of the volumes are lifted up on pilotis, opening up the building’s ground level to serve as a set of shaded, subtly graded plazas linking the park behind to the future neighborhood in front. Interspersed are entrances to various programmatic spaces—an escalator up to the main library lobby, a direct entrance to a children’s library, a twisting ramp to the museum galleries—and a set of round, one-story structures housing a shop, café, information booths, and a spiral stair down to underground spaces including an auditorium and a parking garage. Both the library and museum entries are accessed from an area that is enclosed in mesh; this space can be locked when the two institutions are closed, but the remainder of the ground floor will remain open 24 hours a day.
The building is officially called the Taichung Green Museumbrary—a portmanteau that sounds better in Chinese than English—and indeed its most distinctive programmatic element is that it co-locates the main branch of the Taichung Public Library system with the newly founded Taichung Art Museum. (Taichung has long been home to the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, but until now did not have a municipal art museum.) In keeping with the possibilities suggested by this combination, SANAA, working with architect of record Ricky Liu & Associates, has not limited either museum or library to a single volume. Instead, galleries and reading rooms are each distributed across different volumes, and visitors move freely across the complex: there is almost always more than one way to get from point A to point B. On two of the building’s six floors, floating walkways link the library and museum, enabling you to cross between them midway through a visit. The uppermost walkway, on the fifth floor, brings you outdoors into a mesh-enclosed box crisscrossed by ramps and dubbed the “culture forest,” an expansive space that does not yet, but ought to, have places to sit and relax.
For Sejima, the library and museum offer “two different ways of learning,” and placing both together raises the possibility of the programs’ shaping each other—from exhibitions in which books could be borrowed or library functions incorporating artworks to broader ways of “expanding our thinking and imagination.” At present, there is not much evidence of this happening. The museum and library remain separate: the reading rooms and galleries, as currently programmed, don’t stray from the modes of operation and organization that we have all learned to expect from these institutions.
For now, more immediate concerns dominate. At the complex’s fanfare-filled opening in December, Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-Yen voiced the hope that the Museumbrary “makes the world see Taichung, and places Taichung on the world’s stage”—a comment in which one can detect both familiar civic boosterism and a Taiwan-specific desire for the international recognition that the island has long been denied in the realm of politics. Not surprisingly, the galleries, all vast, flexible boxes designed before the museum was founded, seem best suited to sensational, Instagram-friendly installations of the sort associated with the global art circuit; and the initial set of exhibitions, which brings together a dizzying array of work from around the world with a vaguely environmental theme, only furthers this impression. The scale of the galleries was a “big challenge,” says museum director Nicole Yi-Hsin Lai, and some of the loveliest works on display, including a set of paintings of the transformed landscape of central Taiwan by the artist Hung Tien-Yu, feel minuscule by comparison.
I preferred the library reading rooms, with their curtain-filtered windows, intimate nooks, and snaking SANAA–designed tables and benches. These are spaces that reward wandering: an unexpected staircase transports you to a hidden terrace, a small exhibition teaches you about the history of encyclopedias. It’s all impeccably stylish. Meeting areas are encased in curving walls of acrylic. The soft hum of air-conditioning emerges from registers embedded in the bookshelves. Yet, as with so much of SANAA’s work, the effect is gentle, tranquil, rather than precious. Somehow, these architects again and again manage to create uncommon, daring, ultra-designed things that are nonetheless comfortable and unpretentious. There is something important about this that is not easy to put a finger on. I suspect that it relates to a certain attitude toward form-making. SANAA rose to prominence during the era of starchitecture and its formal acrobatics, and now Sejima and Nishizawa too are sought out by clients around the world looking to build signature buildings—hence the commission in Taichung. And yet, even as the shimmering, diaphanous Museumbrary fulfills the demands imposed upon it—that it attract the attention of foreign media, establish the legitimacy of a new district, and so on—it does so without the self-importance common with starchitecture; that is, without naively presenting itself as radical either in its formal inventiveness or its capacity to engender cultural change.
Perhaps this is where the understated frankness of Sejima and Nishizawa’s work comes from: an acceptance of the limits of what form can do. Where they find agency to intervene in the world of their own accord is neither in big, brash gestures nor in obsessively resolved details. Instead, it is in subtle, calibrated moves—in providing ample space for chance encounters and discoveries in the reading rooms, in treating the ground level as an unrestricted public space, in holding open the possibility for institutional boundaries to one day be blurred.
Image courtesy SANAA
Image courtesy SANAA
Image courtesy SANAA
Credits
Architect: SANAA — Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa; principals; Takayuki Hasegawa, Takashige Yamashita, Takayuki Furuya, Asano Yagi, Kota Fukuhara, Amira Ho, design team
