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By: Angela Caputo, Katherine Skiba and Blair Kamin
Former first couple Barack and Michelle Obama on Wednesday offered the first look at the design of the planned Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park — a campus of three buildings highlighted by an eye-catching museum, whose height and splaying walls would make a bold architectural statement.
The design calls for closing Cornell Drive, a major thoroughfare that runs through Jackson Park, to create a campus-like setting for the presidential center, one that the former president said would be akin to Millennium Park. That is likely to draw fire from thousands of drivers who each day use Cornell, which links South Lake Shore Drive, Stony Island Boulevard and the Chicago Skyway.
To its south would be the forum, which will house an auditorium, restaurant and public garden, and the library, which will contain a trove of documents, emails, photos and artifacts from Obama’s eight years in office.
The existing athletic field and track will be moved just south, according to the renderings.
The Obama Foundation, the nonprofit in charge of building the center, is touting the building as “a working center for civic engagement and a place to inspire people and communities to create change.”
Initial reaction from one park advocacy organization was positive. “It incorporates the best of the outdoors and the best of the indoors,” said Louise McCurry, president of the Jackson Park Advisory Council. “There’s lots of green space, lots of grass and room for kids to run and to play.”
Another prominent group, Friends of the Parks, which had opposed situating the library on parkland, had a more measured reaction, saying that it had not yet had time to assess the plans.
The design was crafted by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the husband-wife New York architects who were scheduled to appear with the Obamas at a South Shore Cultural Center event unveiling the plan.
The news release from the Obama Foundation did not specify the building’s cost. The center is expected to cost at least $500 million. Wednesday’s announcement is likely to kick off a fresh round of fundraising for the center.
The foundation said the three buildings could encompass 200,000 to 225,000 square feet. That would be roughly the same size, or slightly larger, than the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.
The center will be built in the northwest corner of historic Jackson Park, on a sliver of land just south of the Museum of Science and Industry. The site was selected last summer over Washington Park.
An architectural model on display at the South Shore Cultural Center showed a possible location for the Obama center’s parking. It could be placed beneath a mound to the west of Stony Island Avenue and to the east of commuter railroad tracks. The site is the eastern terminus of the Midway Plaisance that connects Jackson and Washington Parks.
Obama is scheduled to appear Wednesday night at the Chicago Club to address the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, the same organization that bankrolled Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 “Plan of Chicago.”
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama’s first chief of staff, also was scheduled to speak at the South Shore Cultural Center event.
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