Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects completes Obama Presidential Center

by Ben Dreith

A monumental granite-clad tower surrounded by artificial hills has been completed by US studio Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to honour US president Barack Obama.

Ten years after Barack Obama left office, the Obama Presidential Center will open to visitors next week in Chicago’s South Side.

Anchored by a 225-feet-high (69 meter) granite tower, the centre also contains numerous low-level buildings that were largely covered in landscaping.

“The Center is intended to symbolize President Obama’s journey as both a community organizer and president of the United States,” said architect Paul Schulhof, who served as a partner for Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA) on the project and now runs his own studio.

“It is designed to empower visitors by helping them understand history while inspiring them to create change in their own communities,” he continued.

“This idea is expressed architecturally through a campus of multiple buildings.”

While the auxiliary buildings are nestled into the landscape designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh, the tower itself is monumental, a request from Obama that TWBTA co-founder Tod Williams said was surprising at first.

“We didn’t think of a tall tower at that time,” he said, referring to the early stages of the design. “We thought the president was more modest, and it should be a more modest solution.”

The tower is wrapped in New Hampshire granite, with parts of its apex made into five-foot-tall letters that spell out words from Obama’s speeches.

This lettering creates a screen for a skyroom at the top of the structure, which is publicly accessible, as is the majority of the complex. According to Williams, the use of granite makes the building “emotional.”

“The building is emotional because if it were raining, it’s dark – but when it’s sunny, it’s quite bright.”

A few punched windows were included over the facade, which has an abstract, sculptural appearance that the architecture studio has likened to four hands meeting vertically in an embrace.

“As a monolith, it’s actually four hands coming together,” said Williams. “We wanted the building to be interesting and different from each side, so that it’s actually iconic as a memory piece – it’s intentionally more sculptural, and we’re able to do that because, in fact, it didn’t require that many windows.”

The entrance to the tower faces a paved courtyard that also gives access to the wide complex. At its entrance, a recess in the granite is filled by panes of frosted glass that can be illuminated at night.

The centre is sited on a 19.3-acre campus on the northwest side of Jackson Park, where it connects to the horizontal Midway Plaisance Park on the south edge of the University of Chicago.

Jackson Park was designed in the late 19th century by American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, of Central Park fame, and preservationists were initially unhappy with the decision to disrupt the design of the urban park.

According to Williams, his studio was selected from the field of seven because of their vision for the centre as an integrated campus.

“We were the only ones of the seven who had an idea about a campus, and with passages to connect the landscape, and covering the entire site as much as possible with soil and turning that into a parkscape,” he said during a tour in October 2025.

Part of the brief included the filling in of a six-lane road that ran through the park, reconnecting the urban space; a trade-off, perhaps, for the disruption of the Olmsted scheme.

The campus has most of the buildings clustered at the north end of the site, with a Forum Building, a Chicago Public Library branch and a pavilion spread out in offset, rectilinear forms south of the primary tower structure.

They rise up as landscaped platforms that create courtyards and voids for garden spaces and plazas in between.

From here, playgrounds, a great lawn, and a wetland park are separated by winding paths and overpasses that lead visitors to the southern edge of the site, where US studio Moody Nolan has installed an athletics building called Home Court.

At the north of the site, the preexisting Women’s Garden has been rebuilt with a swirling array of paths branching out from a landscape-in-the-round.

All of the parking has been pushed under the site, and the Obama Foundation staff emphasised the high level of rain-capture capabilities integrated into the plan.

From here, the tower’s lobby features wide open spaces and an interior scheme of patinated metal, wood and exposed concrete. Aspects of the atrium and mezzanine have glossy end-grain flooring.

A massive atrium with a winding staircase rises, passing by an artwork called Uprising of the Sun by Julie Mehretu, a painting on a massive pane of glass that, from the outside and inside, resembles stained glass.

Further details on the interiors of the other structures are still being released, and the studio said it planned to have a more thoroughgoing architectural photoshoot once the foliage in the park programme begins to grow in.

Obama is the 14^th American president to have an official memorial building, which is mostly privately funded, but administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

While most of these structures built for former presidents are generally referred to as a presidential library, Obama has pushed back on that designation.

The building is being called a “center” in reference to the expansiveness of programming desired by the Obama family in their commission of TWBTA in 2015.

We recently rounded up the other presidential libraries, from Herbert Hoover to George W Bush, to show how the buildings have evolved to reflect the legacy of each president.

More images of the Obama Presidential Center: