Tod and Bille on the Obama Presidential Center
'A Democratic Landscape'
Architecture Hunter visits the Obama Presidential Center ahead of its opening on June 19, speaking with Barack Obama and architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien about the design of the campus and the 225-foot-tall granite-clad tower that houses the museum.
Yesterday we took a photo tour of the Obama Presidential Center ahead of its opening this Friday. Given the numerous buildings that comprise the new campus—Museum Tower, Forum, Chicago Public Library, and Home Court—it can be hard to get one's bearings without being there. Therefore, the below 8-minute video from Architecture Hunter, which intersperses interviews with the client and architects—Obama in the Nelson Mandela Sky Room, Williams and Tsien in the public library overlooking the plaza—with footage of various exterior and interior spaces, should give viewers get a better grasp on a project that much of the architecture community is focusing on this month. Coming to the fore in the interviews are the importance in creating a campus rather than a singular building, the inspiration behind the architectural form of the tower-in-a-park, and the hopes for the OPC after it opens to the public.