Apparently that grey chunk will be covered by a frame consisting of one of Obama’s speeches.
“You are America ed by habiland unencumbered dy to seize we be for every country there to be taken the nd to cover the ridges to be cr not the s not the proje person the sing” etc etc. Genius design from a team of brain geniuses. This was designed so that it looks good in a 3D render where you can read the text by jiggling the mouse around the building at will, like the eye of god. For us humble mortals on the ground it’ll be a tower of babble.
tower of babble
That looks like fucking garbage
Fastforward four hundred years to the future in which local warlord clans have practiced their artillery on it until the only remaining letters say “BORAT VOICE MY WIFE”
At least it’s a step up in complexity from the Mussolini face and just ‘Si’ repeating
Dumb as hell but it is an aesthetic improvement.
What’s actually inside these things
Like surely even obamna himself couldn’t have bloviated enough to fill an entire building
Not sure about the other presidential libraries, but I’ve been to the Clinton library in Little Rock, AR and it’s basically like a museum for his presidency. It’s filled with memorabilia like letters from celebrities congratulating him on his election and binders with his daily presidential schedule and shit. It’s basically a glaze house for Bill Clinton.
The ego of these fucking guys
The Presidential Center consists of the “Obamalisk”, which will have a museum about the Obamas and special exhibit space. I think it will also house the offices of the Obama Foundation? It has to, I don’t believe an Obama museum alone warrants such a big building.
Alongside that there will be additional buildings housing a library and various other cultural facilities. The archive for presidential records that usually accompanies presidential libraries will be digitised and stored somewhere else.
Imagine putting this amount of resources into like a housing project or community center instead of a modern day pharaoh’s burial complex
This thing had to have cost billions, plus extra billions to hire the only construction crew in the u.s. who can actually finish anything in under a decade
$850 million, all “privately fundraised”
Construction costs are currently at $850 million, more than double of the previous presidential library (
). This money is coming from the Obama Foundation (from donations by God knows who), but once finished the City of Chicago will be footing the bill on operating costs, which can get out of hand fast if the center ends up flopping.To alleviate that, the Obama Foundation promised a $470 million reserve fund to compensate, but currently there’s only $1 million in it and it has remained unchanged for years, possibly because the ballooning construction costs are eating into their budget.
The archive for presidential records that usually accompanies presidential libraries will be digitised and stored somewhere else.
So literally the whole point and the only thing of possible value to anyone else.
And ‘digitized’ might as well mean ‘shredded’
Lib shit, I know, but Last Week Tonight did a whole segment on presidential libraries recently. What they do, and why they can be really cringe sometimes
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I feel like this is going to be one of those buildings that becomes famous as a suicide destination. It just has the right aesthetic, ya know?
I think the United States is one of the only places on earth that does this. In most of the world people would find it incredibly weird to have a large compound dedicated to celebrating the cult of an ex-leader, especially one who is still alive. This includes literal monarchies.
Russia has the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg, which is a museum plus convention center. A Russian communist claimed it receives more money from the government than the Hermitage and Tretyakov Gallery combined because it keeps losing money.
The Yeltsin Center was established in accordance with the 2008 law “On centers of historical heritage of presidents of the Russian Federation ceased to carry out its powers” for the preservation, study and public presentation of the heritage of the first President of the Russian Federation “in the context of the recent history of the Fatherland, the development of democratic institutions and the rule of law”.
Based off the title of that law there will be one for Putin when it comes to it.
Until this comment I genuinely believed this was some sort of official project prefixed with Obama in the way that the rental bicycles in London are commonly known as the Boris Bikes
hold on, it’s still rendering
Uhh, let me overengineer.
Leave it to Amerikkka to ruin brutalism. If the Soviet Union had built this and stuck a statue of Stalin on top of it, y’all would be big fans of it. It just looks evil because the Evil Empire built it. (And because of over a century of “evil empire” aesthetics in fiction being directly taken from actual Soviet brutalism, communism doesn’t have an evil empire aesthetic, Western fiction’s evil empires have a communist aesthetic, but that’s a whole nother struggle session.) Although I will admit, there are ways to do brutalism right and ways to do it wrong, and… there’s a reason I tend to like how the Soviets often did it, but hate a lot of Western attempts. Brutalism’s one of those things that capitalists just can’t ever get right the way communists can, I guess. (Admittedly, not everything the Soviets ever built looked amazing, but overall they have a way better track record at doing brutalism right than any Western nation.)
It’s not brutalism, it’s just clad in granite panels.
Precisely my point. They were probably going for brutalism, but they certainly didn’t do it correctly.
The lack of windows on most of the structure is really bizarre, must be miserable to work there
Yep. There’s neat brutalist architecture that does interesting stuff with combinations of flat concrete boxes and cubes and almost industrial bits of glass and metal, and then there’s just making a windowless featureless concrete box, and this is a lot more of the second than the first.
Even Soviet “commieblocks”, the quintessential example of “badly done brutalism that does nothing cool and looks terrible” in the Western cultural consciousness, have windows. (Well, I think they look good, but I know most Western liberal types disagree and so do a lot of communists. But at least most of us agree they look a hell of a lot better than tents and sleeping bags lining streets and filling parks. And they definitely look better than a lot of the apartment buildings we see in capitalist countries. I walk past buildings every day that look way worse than “commieblocks”.)
Leave it to Obama to ruin brutalism. The fuck is this shit?
I found a NYT article that I figured would be dry-as-dust but it ended up to be very amusing and classic Obama. Obama put a speech of his on "“the Obamalisk”.
A comment
If it weren’t for the stained glass window it would look like a prison out of The Blade Runner. I don’t think this architecture will stand the test of time.
It is visible from almost anywhere on Chicago’s South Side, a 225-foot-tall chunky obelisk that some have nicknamed “the Obamalisk.” The structure is the centerpiece of what will be by far the most expensive presidential center ever constructed and, like the president whose vision shaped it, it is setting off intense and often conflicting reactions.
[…]
The plan has courted controversy since it was announced a decade ago. Local groups protested, and filed lawsuits, over its potential impact both on their beloved Jackson Park, created by the designers of New York’s Central Park, and on what is already rampant gentrification in the area.
[…]
The merging of building and green space was intended to soften the center’s impact on Jackson Park. “There was a great deal of focus on the way that it more kindly and gently was a presence in those landscapes,” said Mr. Van Valkenburgh, landscape architect.
[…]
The building’s form was inspired by the idea of four hands joining together, reaching skyward. Stare long enough at the structure and the angles along its flanks start to resemble knuckles, with fingers stretching up. Mr. Obama has been an aficionado of architecture since childhood — “Somehow I took a wrong turn and got into politics,” he said jokingly — and he was not hesitant to lend his input, sharing rough sketches with the designers. “I’m sure there were times when I got on their nerves a little bit.”
[…]
The center is being built on land owned by the City of Chicago under an agreement with the Obama Foundation, which pays a total of $10 for 99 years. Privately funded, it is projected to cost about $850 million. The Clinton Presidential Center and Park, in Little Rock, Ark., by contrast, cost $165 million ($288 million, adjusted for inflation), while the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas came in at $327 million ($460 million today).
[…]
Mr. Obama wants the center to be a vital, welcoming slice of urbanity occupied by people and landscapes as much as by structures. “I am a big believer in public spaces and public gatherings,” Mr. Obama said. ”I love the idea of creating spaces that make people feel more alive, more connected.”
He recalled how some of the Chicago housing projects he encountered in his early days of community organizing, like the infamous Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green, promoted just the opposite. “The architecture itself sent a message,” he said. “It dictated the separation of people.”
Making the presidential center into a campus opened up more areas for public use — some inside buildings, some between them, and some even atop them. Only the museum will require a paid ticket. Nearly a dozen other spaces — meeting rooms, classrooms, parks, an N.B.A.-size basketball court, even a branch of the Chicago Public Library — will be reserved for visitors or the activities of the foundation, and its leadership-training activities, jobs programs and more.
Mr. Obama said he wanted the center to be “a living, breathing, dynamic cultural and gathering space.”
[…]
Hugging a granite-floored central courtyard is the Forum, a long, low space with a 299-seat auditorium, two studios for visitors to record music and podcasts, classrooms, a cafe and the foundation’s offices.
At the end of the plaza is the library branch, which will offer digital media spaces, vocational services and an area filled with books chosen by the Obamas themselves. A short walk away is Home Court, a glassy structure with a full basketball court, designed by Moody Nolan Architects, which contains workout spaces and doubles as a large event venue.
[…]
Dixon Romeo, the executive director of Southside Together, a local group that joined with more than a dozen others to push the Obama Foundation, the city and the University of Chicago to make binding agreements to help the community, said that rents in areas adjacent to the center have spiked. Developers, he said, have been buying up buildings, forcing out low-income tenants, and creating new luxury developments capitalizing on the center’s (and the Obamas’) prestige.
“How do we ensure that the city of Chicago does not let this be another case of something that was supposed to help Black folks actually hurt them?” Mr. Romeo asked.
The center is being built on land owned by the City of Chicago under an agreement with the Obama Foundation, which pays a total of $10 for 99 years.
Wow i wish I could buy a huge campus in the middle of fucking Chicago for less than a dollar a fucking year
goddamn, it kinda seemed cool but building new shit and amenities does tend to gentrify since we don’t have things like rent control in most places.
Does tend to gentrify.
I love comparing Obama to Trump.
Trump says “Fuck you. I’ll do what I want.”
Obama spends an 10 minutes bloviating about stuff like “potential of the human spirit” but eventually he effectively says “fuck you” too.
I saw Andor. Pretty sure that’s the Imperial Garrison on Ghorman /j
tbh feels appropriate for someone who’s spilled as much blood as him
This is supposedly a library by the way…
He wanted to capture the occult library aesthetic.
That looks like a place I could sign a summoning contract with forces from beyond the spheres.
You mean Citigroup
Unfortunately the only dark forces responding to your summons are from Goldman-Sachs and Chase Bank
And United Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, and for some reason Keyser Söze
Apparently this is going to be owned by the city of Chicago and have a Chicago library branch, so that’s pretty cool. I’m not sure the other presidential libraries did that(looks like Dubya and Clinton don’t have that but they are federally operated). Obamas is the first to not be federally run by NARA, though they are supposedly going to work with NARA to digitize records.
The only people who hate this hate brutalism and they are wrong.
The only people who hate this hate brutalism and they are wrong.
lol okay
Spiked rent in the area too cause fuck the people who actually live there
YOU ARE AMERICA
ED BY HABIT AND
DY TO SEIZE WE
BE FOR EVERY
COUNTRY THERE
TO BE TAKEN THE
Join me Mr. Chapo, in the SuperCube!
