Architecture: The Grand Opening of the Obama Library June 18, 2026

Though we are preoccupied with the audit and the Council, and leadership or lack of it, even a good discussion has me weary.

I need a momentary break from the effect of a steady diet of ‘trouble,’ even when justified, it is cramping my usual style, that of optimism, and an eagerness to keep learning,

Of all diversions, you would not guess that I have picked the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago to write about. Take a break with me and maybe learn a few things about the endlessly fascinating subject, architecture.

Growing up in Evanston, the first suburb on the lake just north of Chicago, I was, without knowing it, enrolled in an ongoing class in architecture every time my father took the outer drive into the city.

I had no language for what I was seeing. No understanding of style, or structure, or intention. Only a growing sense of wonder.

And slowly, without announcement, that wonder became an education.

A rare privilege, though at the time, I would not have known to call it that.

This education was not the kind found in books or classrooms, but something absorbed slowly, almost without notice. Buildings passed by, some formal, some bold, some reaching, some grounded.

Looking back now, I realize I was being introduced to some of the most important teachers a city can offer.

As the years went on, I continued to look at the buildings we passed, wondering what they looked like inside, about the doormen, what it would feel like to step out the door into a taxi and off to dinner in one of the glamorous restaurants.

I was being taught that there is a sense of order here, even in variety. The buildings do not compete so much as take their place. I could not have named this, but I felt it. A city, at its best, knows how to compose itself.

In that same city, on the South Side, the Obama Presidential Center has risen in Jackson Park, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, chosen through a national competition and supported by layers of review, it is, by every formal measure, a considered project.

When seeing the first photographs, I turned my nose up at this block of concrete with few windows. I thought it quite an affront to Chicago architecture. What I had taken, at first glance, to be a single statement, a tower standing apart, was in fact only a fragment of a much larger idea.

I still don’t like this tower, but I like the idea of the Presidential Center.

I had assumed that tower was the library itself, and judged it accordingly, finding it at odds with Chicago’s long tradition of buildings that meet the street with clarity and grace, but stepping back, and seeing the full plan, helped.

This is not a solitary structure asking to be admired on its own terms, it is part of a broader composition, the Obama Presidential Center, where buildings, paths, gardens, and gathering spaces are meant to work together as a civic landscape,

In that context, the tower is less an object and more an anchor, giving shape to a place designed for movement, conversation, and daily use,

What saves the day for me is that this space becomes more than a library.

It is a small thing, perhaps, to change one’s mind about a building,

But it is not nothing,

It reminds us that understanding does not always arrive at first glance, that sometimes it waits just beyond our certainty, asking for one more look, one more step back, one more willingness to see the whole,

Once I understood that the tower is only one element in a broader landscape I have hope that it will be approached, experienced, and understood over time.

This is where this brief departure from Rocky Mount returns us home again.

Because whether we are speaking of a city council or a city skyline, the question is not simply what is built, or even who approved it.

In our case, the question is whether the Council, as it stands today, reflects care, honesty and a willingness to be in conversation with the people it serves.

Changing people’s minds to see the Council with new eyes is a tall order. For sure they need an alternative to penalizing everyone else for a litany of mistakes the audit has tagged them with.

Preservation is about having new eyes to see. The Council is about giving its citizens a new heart to believe in.

I have been given new eyes to see the Obama Library. The video clips of the opening on June 18 take me beyond a hunk of concrete. And what one sees is amazing. Perhaps it is another architectural wonder in Chicago’s world of beautiful buildings.

Visitors sit in front of Mark Bradford’s “City of the Big Shoulders”, a colorful multimedia piece that extends from the mezzanine to the first floor.