Building Democracy, The Obama Presidential Center

Written in 2021, today January 2026, we are six month away from its opening and it´s looking as exciting as its promise. I wanted to share what I wrote back then. I hope I can go visit it very soon.

 (New York, June 2021)

Democracy is not a new idea; it goes back to the year 508 B.C. in Greece. But classic democracy applied only to a small segment of society. Slaves, immigrants and women were not allowed in the polis. It is not until the XVIIIth century that they say Democracy is fully realized in the United States. 1788 is the year of their Declaration of Independence and the date of birth of their constitution. Alexis de Tocqueville starts his book Democracy in America (1805-1859) with the following paragraph:

Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck my eye more vividly than the EQUALITY OF CONDITIONS. I discovered without difficulty the enormous influence that this primary fact exerts on the course of society (…). As I studied American society, more and more I saw in equality of conditions the generative fact from which each particular fact seemed to issue, and I found it before me constantly as a central point at which all my observations come to an end.

The truth is that their equality of conditions was as equal as in the Hellenistic period. First and foremost, it did not include Native Americans – or the few that were left after being the victims of a genocide in the hands of these Northern Europeans newcomers. It did not include women either (again) and it did not include black people either, because they were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and brought to the New Colonies to be turned into slaves. So I would say that the main difference between Classic Democracy and American Democracy is that in America it is the immigrants who enjoyed it instead of the natives. 

What is most ironic is that slavery is intimately linked to the rise of Democracies in Europe and the US, since it enabled the fast development of a new capitalist class profiting from the free labor, just as it did back in Greece. The huge inequalities within their theoretical framework of Equality of Conditions were made possible by ideologies of racism (and misogyny). 

The French Revolution was more of a bourgeois revolution than a French one, and as Lester K. Spence writes “the economy that enabled the French to overthrow both their aristocracy and monarchy was driven by slave colony revenues – Saint Domingue in particular. (…) It’s the wealth from this trade that makes innovation in political theory (the social contract theorists all developed their work during this period), economics (Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is written during this period) and industry (the Industrial Revolution) possible.”[1]

It is fair to say that without slavery, the US emancipation wouldn’t have been possible, and without emancipation, there would have been no Democracy at that moment, but English Monarchy.

Democracy is a social contract and the 1788 Constitution its formal blueprint. “Between 1783 and 1793 alone, almost 900 ships leave Liverpool for the Caribbean, carrying 303,737 soon-to-be-enslaved Africans, valued over £15,000,000 ($3.2 billion in 2015).”[2] By 1875 12,521,337 captives were embarked from Africa to the New World! These numbers come from Raoul Peck’s recent documentary series “Exterminate All Brutes” (2021) and it is a must see to understand the narratives these people have been telling themselves and the world for centuries. We are at the dawn of a new era, and truth finally is shining bright.

Race ideologies were invented for purely economic reasons and in order to salvage white men’s conscience from the barbaric and criminal domination, exploitation and extermination they were actually perpetrating, so they could loot freely wherever they decided to go. In retrospect, white men might be looked down in history as the real brutes and uncivilized people of all races of this earth. The Huns were more civil than this. We need to thank the Catholic and Protestant Churches for this as well (they are the good conscience caretakers J). “It created a model in which fantasies of cultural superiority gave people the right, even the duty, of subduing others that they considered to be inferior. A strange, convoluted logic, inherited from centuries of Judeo-Christian prejudice, coupled with greed and invasive, colonial zeal, led Western European countries down the path of nearly worldwide domination and destruction.”[3] 

The term White Supremacy – sadly so in vogue these days again in the US – is in fact a European import. The only difference with Europe is that whereas in the former colonies the white man was in fact an intruder and he eventually was forced to leave, in the US they managed so well to decimate the local population that, even if black people came along with them and were as foreigners as they were, they became the other, and by enslaving them they cut all access and rights to the land for them. In this manner the very ugly and brutal cultural racism that is so engrained in this country of the “Equality of Conditions” was born.

The text of the Constitution is very inspiring; it just didn’t include all the people in its application. In his essay The Art of Democracy, Pascal Gielen writes:

“Putting it simple, the bottom line of any democratic regime consists of two fundamental principles. Firstly, the assurance that the power of the demos is represented by a majority and, secondly, the guarantee of a legal framework that at least protects minorities (Lukacs, 2005: 5). At best, such a framework also supports, encourages and emancipates minorities. So, paradoxically, within a democracy the majority creates or protects the possibility of the minority becoming the majority and assuming power.” [4] 

Very slowly -- with a lot of hard work and blood shed -- American Democracy has been improving itself. First slavery was abolished in 1863, black people got the right to vote in 1866-70 (but then segregation laws like Jim Crow, disenfranchisement and active violence ensued and we are still today fighting to defend voting rights for minorities!), from 1920 to 1965 women of all races (who were as disenfranchised as black people and Native Americans) got the right to vote. The aftermath of WWII and Roosevelt Social policies turned into a social revolution and brought about the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and the 70s Women Liberation Movement after a century of suffragettes’ activism. The backlash of this progressive agenda arrived in 1981 in the form of president elect Ronald Reagan and his active dismantling of social policies -- claiming the need for “small government” -- and his privatization of everything public (backed by the capitalist white and extreme right who has gotten immensely rich since). Not surprisingly this was orchestrated in conjunction with Great Britain and their prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Three decades of free market economy led to the biggest recession in US history since 1929 and we are back at the biggest social inequality since the Gilded Age. And then, almost by a miracle, in 2009 -- amidst this global economic crisis created by Wall Street bankers and their shady businesses -- was sworn president the first black man in US history, Barack Obama. And he even got reelected for a second term.

For eight years the White House was not so white anymore, with a black president of mix race parents (white American mother and black African father) and a gorgeous black first lady from the South Side of Chicago – grand-daughter of sharecroppers and descendant of slaves. Both incredibly intelligent and Ivy League educated – proof that the system, even if flawed, can work.

The Obama administration lifted the country from the recession and managed to create a health care reform that has helped millions of Americans get health insurance while making profits for the private sector (reason why they haven’t dismantled it) despite the active opposition he had since day one. We can easily say that Barack Obama has been one of the most competent people to seat in that Oval Office. Everybody thought the US had finally arrived, only to wake up to the biggest nightmare on Earth in the form of the following president, Donald Trump Jr. – a sociopath and son of a Klansman – who won the election with that same old racist ideology and discourse of white supremacy and hate. And he delivered!

I call Trump the Jungian shadow of the United States. He has brought to the surface the not-so-hidden reality of the race problem in this country. During his presidency he gave license to enact behaviors that many people thought no longer existed. Young people --who didn’t grow up in the 60s -- were especially outraged. Murders of innocent black people in the hands of the police went unpunished and proliferated, until the assassination of George Floyd by a police officer that got recorded on a phone and went viral. He knew he was being filmed and didn’t give a damn. Just like in Spike Lee’s movie Do The Right Thing (1989) where a police kills a black man in a similar manner (by chocking him) while everybody is watching and yelling for him to stop, that he is going to kill him, and knowingly he continues until his life is taken away.

This brutal murder gave birth to the social movement Black Lives Matter and to a series of public demonstrations across the country by society as a whole, despite being in the height of a pandemic – also because there were no consequences for that police officer. It was as if we were back at Jim Crow; and the country rebelled. It is beautiful to see all that is happening since in terms of racial awareness and activism. As I write this, just yesterday, a year later, that police officer has finally gone to court accused of murder and has been found guilty of the three accusations. It has taken a year. But now the killings of people of color by the police are multiplying, as if they were rebelling or something. We are in a very delicate moment with a lot of gun violence occurring every day. The country seems to be at war with itself.

At least we got rid of the sociopath in office and we even have now a female vice-president for the first time in history, Kamala Harris! And she is not white either [as I edit this text for the book Kamala is running for president]. But the wounds are fresh and open, and as we speak, the Republican Party is in a full-fledge national operation towards voter suppression, which is of course anticonstitutional, to say the least (and very embarrassing for a country that has been advertising itself as the saviors of democracies throughout the world). They have correctly realized that without voter suppression aimed at black and Latino communities they are not winning more elections. It’s pure mathematics. The paradox Gielen was pointing out, that “within a democracy the majority creates or protects the possibility of the minority becoming the majority and assuming power” is finally happening here, and boy, is the extreme right (who obviously is white) scared of this… And since women are part of it, because they have been enslaved by white supremacy (who is obviously male) since the dawn of time, they also have to deal with half the population, if all women chose to vote to protect their rights (which believe it or not is not always the case). As voter suppression is going full steam, the Republican party is back at the war on women trying to suppress their right to make decisions about their bodies and trying to dismantle abortion laws – that old misogynist card. I don’t quite get their strategy… 

 I was startled when a Portuguese friend told me few years after having moved to the US that in here, I was actually a minority. I still have a hard time grasping this idea, since mathematically speaking we actually are the majority. Guess who’s the minority now? The problem is white dudes have almost all the power, so now they are putting our democracy in danger to desperately cling to it. Funny cause they invented Democracy! Great idea

Let’s go back to Gielen’s essay again. He says “some political philosophers, such as Olivier Marchant, doubt whether the current liberal-capitalist regimes meet the criteria for democracy. In many cases, democracy still needs to be established; and in those political regimes where it already exists, it requires constant maintenance. (…) Both China and Russia demonstrate how not-very-democratic regimes are, maybe even more in line with the capitalist market imperative than the democracy we are so accustomed to.” [5]

Capitalism is another story altogether but at the heart of the racial problem, because capitalism thrives on cheap labor. As we saw, the conditions for the Industrial Revolution date of the same period and are facilitated by slavery. Today we don’t have slavery here, but do we? The recent documentary by Ava DuVernay “13^th”, which explores the intersection of race, justice and mass incarceration in the US, shows the links between the high levels of incarceration among blacks and the big businesses “private prisons” are, because inmates work for free. The film tries to demonstrate how this is a form of covered slavery. Immigrants were so welcomed to this country, among other things, because when they abolished slavery, they needed a new source of cheap labor. To this day women get pay less money for doing the same job than a man. Can a real full Democracy and Capitalism coexist? Stay tuned for the next decade… Gielen warns us, “It is important to realize that democracy is a relatively young form of government, which (…) is still rather fragile and vulnerable.”[6] How do we protect it and strengthen it?

***

Let’s come back now to the present and to the object of this essay – The Obama Presidential Center – whose aim is precisely that; strengthen democracy. The week after Joe Biden (who was actually Obama’s vice president) got sworn in, the architectural project for the Obama Presidential Center in the South Side of Chicago (where Michelle is from and where Barack started his professional life as community organizer) got finally green light to start. Of course, the Trump administration had been blocking it for few years, the same way the GOP tried to block all the work he tried to accomplish as president. It’s amazing he got anything done.

The forces conspiring against anything “Obama” were there before Donald Trump showed up and have never stopped since. We should be thankful Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and not Mitt Romney – the Koch’s brothers betting horse. Trump with his outrageous mental disorders and autocratic streak has but imploded the radical right movement that the Koch’s (the fossil fuel magnates) and his circle of billionaires “friends” have been funding for decades! Jane Meyer’s book Dark Money explains this crystal clear. She says, “In short, during the Obama years, the Koch’s radicalized and organized an unruly movement of malcontents, over which by 2016 they had lost control.”[7] A month before Trump was elected, one former employee in the Koch’s political operation admitted to Politico “We are partly responsible [for Trump’s election] (…) We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots army that was not controllable.”[8]

We can say it’s that same grassroots army that invaded the Capitol last January 6th, encouraged by Donald Trump, to try to stop the democratic process of ratifying the presidential election results. A sort of clumsy and tepid Coup d’Etat. And now the comedy is that they have stopped Congress from creating a commission to investigate it! And because Republicans didn’t have the majority, they used the Jim Crow filibuster. This screams “guilty and racist”, but at least it is opening the eyes of more people every day on the real nature of that party. I find all this so surreal…

I was not educated for this world. As Michelle said on her podcast, we have educated our children for a world that has yet to come. We will bring it, because it is our world already, and they are older and will die before us. The key is, as Barack says, if we will be able to keep “the fort” (sorry, I had to use it) long enough for when they get to power. Cause these savages are willing to throw democracy out the window!

As Mayer says “the Kochs and their allied big donors became victims of their own success.”[9] Her book was published in 2016. Trump won with a populist discourse targeted to a blue-collar base, promising them to “stick it to the elites” and to Wall Street. And they believed him. As a good narcissist and sociopath (as described by his niece Mary L. Trump - Ph. D in advanced psychology - in her book about her uncle, subtitled “How my family created the world’s most dangerous man”) he is a pathological liar and of course nothing has been further from that lie. We can find an explanation already in Mayer’s introduction (Nov 2016) to what has happened:

“The fact of the matter was that while Trump might have been elected by those he described as “the forgotten” men, he would have to deal with a Republican Party that had been shaped substantially by the billionaires of the radical right. He would have to work with a vice president once funded by the Kochs and a congress dominated by members who owed their political careers to the Kochs.”

And work with them he did! Even as he sent a mob to attack the Capitol where his vice president was (together with his family) ratifying the election results, the Republican Party still is now defending him and supporting him as their 2024 candidate, which will never happen, because hopefully he’ll be in jail by then [but it did happen and yesterday president Trump invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president Maduro, a dictator, to get hold of the country´s oil business, eroding a step further international law and democratic principles].   

As you can see, money is its own ideology. The big mystery for me is the millions of people, US citizens, that still believe in him after these four years of shit show and covid deaths, with his pathetic cult of personality and a discourse of hate, while furthering the White Supremacy and radical right agendas. This is how dictators get to power, I guess… But it never happens without powerful people backing these illuminati, powerful people like the ones who have bought the Republican Party, so they can keep filling their pockets.

Trump has revealed the real evil and shear ugliness that is behind him and the Republican Party, which is so rotten at its chore. They now have lost the White House, the Senate and Congress – hence all the desperate voter suppression campaign. It’s people like Stacey Abrams and many others, working with grassroots organizations, who have made this possible.

The reality is that if you put together all the minorities (I will include women in the group even though we are not; mathematically speaking) we are the majority already. Empowering these communities is vital to strengthen our Democracy that we almost loose, had Trump won reelection. Many people have realized this, and the work is only beginning. Finally, the words in the constitution “Equality of Conditions” for everybody could finally be realized if we protect and expand voting rights and keep empowering people, the objective of the Obama Presidential Center.

*

If I made this introduction so long, is to understand the importance and the perfect timing of the Obama Presidential Center. It operates at so many levels that I am going to try to dissect it a bit – from historical, to social, to political, to urbanistic, to architectural. No wonder Republicans wanted so hard to prevent it from happening, because it is a very intelligent, well-thought of and powerful intervention, with social justice and empowerment as its chore. And of course their easiest critique is that it is a monument to his ego, when nothing could be further from the truth. 

It is a historical achievement for this country that after 400 years of racism, a black person became president for the first time. He was in a way signaling the world to come. As the saying goes, “if you can dream it, you can make it.” The backlash was so huge that we ended with Trump eight years later. The white extreme right was furious. Republicans did all they could to boycott every single one of his proposals – even if good for the “American People” – and when he ended his second term, Trump came and tried to dismantled everything he had been able to do.

But change, let’s hope, is here to stay; and so this ambitious project becomes a lighthouse metaphor – a crystallization of sorts.

We all need role models, to be able to project ourselves into the future. The more these models look like us, the better we can see ourselves getting there. Like for women, black people have had it a bit harder. In a way we both have been enslaved to the white men, who in turn have created the narratives for our enslavement. They even said women didn’t enjoy sex! So we don’t run around fornicating with the next door neighbor and their cherish properties and possessions end up with the neighbor as well via inheritance (Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex). Sadly, it always boils down to economic reasons if you dig a bit.

All these ideas of race and gender are such cultural constructs.

I know I am making this so long, but I want to tell a story. I met this friend from Barcelona the first time I came to New York at 21. He was black and Catalan. He had an older sister too. One of their parents was black from Africa and the other a Catalan white person. The two kids grew up very Catalan and bourgeois in an all-white world. When I met her she told me this story I never forgot. She recalled coming to New York in the 90s and taking the subway to Harlem. When she got out of the subway she was shocked; everybody was black. She, a black girl, was actually afraid of all the black people like her. Needless to say, that sweet bourgeois life in small Barcelona was very far from Harlem in the 90s. She felt so uneasy. And she was so surprised by her reaction. She wasn’t expecting that. She felt so different from them, which tells you how color is really not an all defining attribute. 

In Barcelona when we were growing up there wasn´t a black population. Immigration wasn’t big yet. I remember I made out with the only black boy in school, also of mix race. He was so exotic. And he was a Catalan too. We had similar culture, despite our different origins and ancestors, but we were basically the same Barcelonian kids. My two black friends felt Catalan, not African-Catalan. They were very accepted by their socio-economic background, so they didn’t feel like “the other.” 

The only real Americans here seem to be the white people. You have African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans (I heard Trump’s son say this term on TV) and the rest of the population, which happens to be white, are the only ones called, exclusively, Americans. Why don’t we call them European-Americans? I never heard that one! Even the only real Americans have a prefix: Native-Americans.

American culture separates people by race, with one dominating the discourse and excluding the others from access to the same privileges they enjoy, despite all being Americans.

It is my belief that a black American feels different from a white one, not because of the color of his skin, but because he is excluded due to the color of his skin. It is subtle but a most important difference. Barack and Michelle couldn’t be more different. Racism has turned pigmentation into a culture. But culture is not genetic, pigmentation is. American culture is a racist culture. I don’t see any other reason for people whose ancestors have lived here for centuries to feel so different from each other – it took just one generation for real cultural integration to my friends in Barcelona -- but racism and the politics and conditions it creates.

The saddest part is that after centuries of these racist narratives, people of color have integrated this evil ideology inside themselves – feeling lesser than. Everyone in one way or another. Every time I hear “Black is Beautiful” it breaks my heart. As if it needed to be said, because they don’t know it or believe it. Toni Morrison´s book The Bluest Eye (1970) portrays this poignantly. You can’t blame them… It’s a lot. Don’t forget it’s the culture. If you couple this with the real and constant harassment, it can break them. And it does many times. The irony is that black people are in general incredibly gorgeous.

Eliminating anti-Semitic narratives from Germany was easy because it was somehow circumstantial and once Hitler was dead they could launch a reparation and education campaign. Germans of my generation who didn’t lived WWII still carry a guilt feeling for the barbarisms of that genocide. In the United States the Ku Kux Klan still is a legal organization.

This White Supremacy is a very ugly business. In fact, I totally believe it is black people, together with other ethnic minorities (and women) who are going to save this country from fascism and self-destruction.

I love what Obama says to Bruce Springsteen in one of the episodes of their podcast Renegades:

“In fact the very struggles that blacks in America were going through were part of what made black folks special. Because they had been in some way fortified by suffer and they had experience cruelty, and as a consequence could help all of us transcend that.”

Springsteen – a blue-collar white man from a small town in New Jersey – and Obama address this particular issue of culture. They are both Americans, regardless of their pigmentation, and have much more that binds them than that separates them. It’s the beauty of this podcast adventure of theirs. The episode called “Money and the American Dream” is a good one too, but I won’t go into it now although it totally relates to the subject at hand.

The truth is that 400 years of separation and exclusion have created a reality for black people in this country, based on an evil economic idea. And so, since this artificial divide has become a reality – social and economic – it has to be broken down. People of color need to have access to the same opportunities as white people, but they seldom have the facilities to help them thrive in their neighborhoods. It’s a question of racism as much as it is a question of classism. Not all black people are poor, and the ones growing up in affluent neighborhoods do much better obviously -- but those neighborhoods are predominantly white. Trump’s “forgotten men” (that he so soon forgot about) are the white poor. This is why Obama and Springsteen podcast is so powerful. Poor people in this country, share a similar experience, regardless of the color of their skin. They are all forgotten by the system. This breaking of a racial divide is what the podcast tries to address. Bruce and Barack have become good friends, realizing in part how much their stories echo each other. How two of the most iconic people in this country who share similar ideals, even if from different fields, and despite the odds against them, have achieved so much. They have realized their personal paths are not so different.

The Obama Presidential Center (OPC) is meant to empower most directly people of color from a specific community – their community -- with this state-of-the-art infrastructure and park. Springsteen – who still lives in his blue-collar neighborhood – kept talking about giving back to his community. But the OPC is also a lighthouse for the country, an inspiration, maybe even a role model institution. This is what “everybody” deserves and has the right to in this country. And Yes! Black people are presidents too.

                                                                   ***

The next level we are going to discuss now happens on an urban scale, and it is half of the reason for my deep excitement, because architecture at its best is an agent for social change. I’d like to talk urbanistically about the impact this architecture complex might have on its neighborhood and the city.

Michelle is from Chicago’s Southside and in her book Becoming she explains the history of this area:

“Our neighborhood was middle-class and racially mixed. (…) In 1950, fifteen years before my parents moved to South Shore, the neighborhood had been 96 percent white. By the time I’d leave for college in 1981, it would be about 96 percent black.

Craig and I were raised squarely in the crosscurrents of that flux. The blocks surrounding us were home to Jewish families, immigrant families, white and black families, folks who were thriving and some who were not. (…) My family, in fact, was probably on the poor side of the neighborhood spectrum. We were among the few people we knew who didn’t own their own home (…). South Shore hadn’t yet tilted the way other neighborhoods had – with the better-off people long departed to the suburbs, the neighborhood businesses closing one by one, the blight setting in – but the tilt was clearly beginning.

We were starting to feel the effects of this transition, especially at school.”[10]

When Barack arrives to Chicago, the transition has already occurred -- not only in Chicago but throughout the country. All the Urban Renewal projects built with the cash from the postwar years, coupled with the exodus to suburbia by white people, not only destroyed the classical American city and landscape, but generated the biggest segregation this country had seen since Jim Crow. It’s its urbanistic variant we could say.

What Robert Moses did in New York to rich historical black neighborhoods like San Juan Hill – that he basically bulldozed -- happened also in Philadelphia and Chicago. Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown worked in the 70s in helping communities save the neighborhood of Philadelphia’s South Street from demolition to run a highway through it. What Jane Jacobs´ seminal book “The death and Life of Great American Cities “(1961) talks about. It was the same type of neighborhood Michelle grew up in. They let it deteriorate and then they declare it beyond repair – a very calculated national strategy. And in the case of Philadelphia´s South Street, they managed to save it, but in most instances the economic pressures were too high and the social involvement too low to fight the violent forces of greed.

When Barack arrives to Chicago, he becomes a community organizer (not a very fancy job for the Harvard graduate he was) but one he felt a responsibility towards. One of my favorites passages from Michelle’s book is where she describes him as a unicorn, like this rare and magical being:

“My purpose had always been to see past my neighborhood – to look ahead and overcome. And I had. I’d score myself two Ivy Leagues degrees. I had a seat at the table at Sidley & Austin. I’d made my parents and grandparents proud. But listening to Barack, I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck. (…) The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. (…) Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

It was a phrase borrowed from a book he’d read when he first started out as an organizer, and it would stay with me for years. It was as close as I’d come to understanding what motivated Barack. The world as it should be.”[11]

Michelle’s neighborhood compared to Altgeld, where Barack was community organizer, was Beverly Hills. It was basically built on a toxic dump, far from the city in the middle of nowhere. This is how the relocations of black neighborhoods of urban renewal went…

Pruitt Iggoe (1952-55), the famous televised 1st architectural demolition (1972) of a modern mega structure housing complex was heralded wrongly by Charles Jencks as a “failure in planning and architecture.”[12] This landscape designer, wannabee theorist, published his book “Postmodern Architecture” in (1977) – after Venturi and Scott Brown publish their two postmodern manifestos, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (CCA), (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (LLV), (1972).

Actually, probably not a coincidence, the Museum of Modern Art republished Complexity & Contradiction in 1977 again. When you read Jenck’s book it is basically a misunderstanding of all Venturi and Scott Brown theories. He is paraphrasing shamelessly all their ideas and he even dares to question them while not bringing a single new idea to the table. His book is made of Venturi and Scott Brown’s ideas wrongly understood. It’s pretty remarkable…

He has sentences like this:

“I would disagree with his historical judgment” (talking about Bob)

“I think it is, but others would deny this”

“a point Venturi’s extreme position brings out”

“Contrary to Venturi, we need more ducks” 

I had the privilege to see an interview Jim Venturi conducted with Jencks in his home in England, and when you see his house interior – where you are welcome by a  couple of giant metallic swans supporting a glass table under a huge golden rococoish mirror – you kind of understand everything. The sentence of his book “the architect must overcode his building” sums it up. And so Postmodern architecture, born under incredibly intelligent, sophisticated and social avert architects like Venturi or Charles Moore was destroyed from the inside. I would say Charles Jencks is postmodernism’s Trojan’s horse.

While an intellectually limited Charles Jenks will see in Modern Architecture the reason for the failing of Social Housing Projects like Pruitt Iggoe, the truth is that it was not modernism, but social policies that were dramatically failing. All this is beautifully explained in the recent documentary The Myth of Pruitt Iggoe[13] [a myth partly created by Jencks who titled his first chapter The Death of Modern Architecture and had Pruitt Iggoe’s demolition picture under it]. It’s terrible how repeating a lie many times becomes mainstream narrative – an expertise of lazy journalism. This not only hurt Postmodern Architecture, but it gave the perfect excuse to the US government to stop investing in Social Housing all together.

The truth is, when Pruitt Iggoe was inaugurated, it was a State-of-the-Art building with all very modern Corbusian principles and technology for the era. Not Altgeld at all -- that was build super cheap on a dump. This was a very expensive infrastructure, in a plot of land not too far away from the city center (reason why they probably tore it down 20 years later, because the land price had come up enough to redevelop it for a wealthier population and violence and decay were too much to invest to rescue it).    

 Le Corbusier said it well, these are “machines a habiter” (machines for housing) and like any machine they need maintenance; without it they’ll break. And maintenance is extremely expensive for these huge structures. The first few years of Pruit Iggoe were like a dream for the new inhabitants. You should hear the tenants talking with such love and pride about it even decades after they left. They moved from small, dark and crowded bad ventilated old apartments in downtown areas to these luminous new tall buildings, with parks for the children to play, with laundry rooms, elevators, wonderful vistas, etc. They were elated. At the outset the buildings were socially and racially mixed, which as Michelle explains is the key to thriving for these lower income neighborhoods. But as the postwar building boom kept happening and white people kept moving out to suburbia, these high-density planned buildings started to empty out too. These machines for housing can’t work without density; they become desolate places very fast and maintenance costs can no longer be put forward by the tenants. The city also stops funding and decay follows fast.

If you go to Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, you can see how such a building can be a total success. Its inhabitants cherish their homes so much and they all pay dutifully the building’s high maintenance cost. They are not people on welfare either.

I am not saying that Pruitt Iggoe was like Marseille, but for the new residents it surely was. But when economic segregation kicks in, white people move out or anyone (as Michelle says) who can afford it, people stop paying for repairs, the city’s government starts cutting the funding, the inhabitants start to feel like left behind (especially young people), drugs arrive, violence, more deterioration and so on. The “broken window” theory I think they call it.

It’s not and never was an architecture problem. It’s a political, economic and social problem. It’s called racial and economic segregation, and in the midst of the 60s Civil Rights movement you can see it as a very effective government strategy to keep the divide physical and solid, countering the black community´s human rights´ plight. 

Another documentary just came out on the involvement of the FBI in Martin Luther King Jr. assassination… White people were scared in the 60s! They were all fleeing to greener and whiter pastures. Racism is a culture of fear. Cold War America is based on a culture of fear -- building nuclear shelters in the basements of their white suburban television world. Fearing blacks, communists, Chinese, Russians, Muslims, even Cubans! The women’s liberation, you name it! What a small world… All of it revived again by Donald Trump and his slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” or we should say better: “Let’s Make America Hate Again”, like in the 50s when they feared and hated everything and everybody.

Anyway, returning to the wonderful Altgeld and to the poor black people in this country bullied for hundreds of years, let’s hear what Barack writes on the subject in his book “Dreams from My Father”:

“The stench, the toxins, the empty, uninhabited landscape. For close to a century, the few square miles surrounding Altgeld had taken in the offal of scores of factories, the price people paid for their high-waged jobs. Now that the jobs were gone, and those people that could had already left, it seemed only natural to use the land as a dump.

   A dump—and a place to house poor blacks. Altgeld might have been unique in its physical isolation, but it shared with the city’s other projects a common history: the dreams of reformers to build decent housing for the poor; the politics that had concentrated such housing away from white neighborhoods, and prevented working families to living there; the use of the Chicago Housing Authority – the CHA – as a patronage trough; the subsequent mismanagement and neglect. It wasn’t as bad as Chicago’s high-rise projects yet [those as Pruitt Iggoe have their own set of problems], the Robert Taylors and Cabrini Greens, with their ink-black stairwells and urine-stained lobbies and random shootings. Altgeld’s occupancy rate held steady at ninety percent, and if you went inside the apartments, you would more often than not find them well-kept, with small touches (…).

  Still everything about the Gardens seemed in perpetual state of disrepair. Ceilings crumbled. Pipes burst. Toilets backed up. Muddy tire tracks branded small, brown lawns strewn with empty flowers planters – broken, tilted, half buried. The CHA maintenance crews had stopped even pretending that repairs would happen any time soon. So that most children in Altgeld grew up without ever having seen a garden. Children who could see only that things were used up, and that there was a certain pleasure in speeding the decay.” [14]

And I’ll continue quoting him because in his early experiences in Chicago as Community Organizer, we probably find the ferment for his entire career and the knowledge behind the Obama Presidential Center’s construction.

 “In other words, it was different for black folks. It was different now, just as it had been different for Angela’s grandparents, who’d been barred from the unions [Michelle also explains this regarding her own family], then spat on as scabs; for her parents, who had been kept out of the best patronage jobs (…) for someone like Angela the past was present (…) it explained why more blacks hadn’t been able to move out into the suburbs while going was still good, why more blacks hadn’t climbed up the ladder into the American dream. It explained why the unemployment in black neighborhoods was more widespread and longstanding, more desperate; and why Angela had no patience with those who wanted to treat black people and white people exactly the same.

   It explained Altgeld.”

It explains more than Altgeld, a whole culture of disenfranchisement, hate and abuse. And poor Jencks blaming it on Modern Architecture… And a last quote from this book which is so good and a very direct road to understand Barack Obama and how and why he became president:

“The stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of great odds, hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people – some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives. I had to ask myself whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams. Could Ruby love herself without hating blue eyes?”

In Architecture School I had a wonderful teacher of urbanism; Manuel de Sola-Morales, a world class urban planner. All our semester with him was centered on one idea: The Intersection. He opposed this to the outdated model of the Masterplan as a way to generate urbanity in a soft, organic and natural manner. The place dictates, not the planner and his agenda.

An Intersection, as planning strategy (Denise Scott Brown always talks about this as well), is a strong and singular intervention, located at the juncture of different forces (two roads is the image but it can be any node that has some energy that can be activated), than by its own activity interacting with those forces, is capable to ignite life and bring transformation in time – the organic sequential aspect is crucial as opposed to the totalizing masterplan approach.

On a big scale, the Guggenheim in Bilbao was this; a singular project located in a privileged setting of an old and important industrial city, whose better days were behind. Since 1997 the city has come back to life, one project (one investor) at a time. If you take a boat today up the river in Bilbao, you’ll find one after another a star-architect building, like a collection of sorts. It is a bit too much, the world does not need so many ducks… Charles Jencks, who advocated for this precisely, might have been a visionary. Sadly, his vision was not of utopia precisely, more like Dubai.

Building singular expensive monumental buildings one after another is not the best way to build urbanity, but this is what the organic growth of that building brought about on the riverbeds of Bilbao; a competition of ducks – without any aggressive social consequences that I am aware of since the area was an abandoned old industrial site. It’s the tourist economy, so characteristic of the post-industrial era of western countries, which is booming now in the Basque city, that is responsible for this scenography urbanism. 

The city is now well-know all over the world and people come as much to see Gehry’s sculptural building as to eat the delicious local gastronomy and discover the beautiful Spanish northern region. This has generated a whole new economy and vitality. It was great for Bilbao for many reasons – one is that the world had not yet seen such spectacular architectural digital aerobics, the novelty effect. I don’t think it will do the same for Helsinki, which is planning to build a Guggenheim franchise in its harbor.

25 years after this “Guggenheim Effect” the trick is not working so much anymore and small city governments throughout the world are ruining themselves at the expense of such costly enterprises. And it’s been not too good for the art world either, when museums spend most of their funds in the container rather than in the content, trying to compete with tourist attractions and sport events. After expanding, museums need to do Blockbuster’s exhibitions to attract a maximum number of visitors to pay for the cost of the architecture. I would say LESS [architecture] IS MORE [art]. 

What might save the day – and museums – is the very recent typology of the cultural container like the SHED in New York, which can house all types of cultural and semi-cultural events without embarrassment -- from fashion weeks to Art Fairs to multimedia musical events. I thought the Immersive Van Gogh which is coming to NY could also be housed there J They should build more Art Sheds throughout the world and leave Museums with their original very noble and educational function free for art lovers and young people. Only my opinion. It’s a tough time for Museums… I read somewhere the other day that people go in search of experiences now when they go to a Museum. Maybe we should accept and embrace that not everybody likes art, instead of trying to compete with Le Cirque du Soleil.

The Intersection strategy has nothing to do with building extravagant things though, even if they occur often. The symbolic aspect of architecture is taken to a caricature level with hypercapitalism. An intersection has to do with density of programs, flux of people, activity generation, the functions called into play, etc regardless of the building aesthetics. Venturi & Scott Brown theorized on their LLV study how “Ducks” have a symbolic function indeed, as it happens in Bilbao, but to place so much expectation on the appearance of a building alone is a rather superficial and narrow perspective on what architecture can do. As with everything, the show-off effect wears off fast and you need more than a sculptural structure to facilitate growth and life.

Now majors of every small town want a Gerhy!  As it happened in the small city of Arles, where Maja Hoffman was given carte blanche to redevelop a big part of the city’s cultural infrastructure to create her Foundation, with the condition she brought a Gerhy building to town. And so she did. From the pictures it looks terrible and completely out of proportion with the rest of the city. Its shinny titanium façade - in a town built out of bricks, ceramic tiles and stone - under the strong sunlight of southern France might have not been the best material option. But it’s its scale the ‘huge’ problem. I heard the metaphor is that it relates to the mountains… So they built a mountain of titanium in the heart of the old city. When you look at the roman amphitheater built also inside the city (the city probably grew around it), which you suddenly discover when you approach it, it’s a lesson on how you can integrate a colossal structure inside a city and not being an eyesore. A 2000-year-old lesson and a lesson of humility as well. But you can blame it on the mayor. 

Her ambitious project, like the Obama Foundation in a way, is a complex for the arts, with exhibition spaces plus the Van Gogh Museum (another great tourist attractor), research and education facilities, residencies, labs, hotels, a restaurant, etc. “La Princesse D’Arles,” as they call Maja, and her pharmaceutical empire are responsible for all of it. It´s an amazing gift to the region and France. Annabelle Selldorf Architects did restore the old train warehouses to house the photo festival and other art events, with a much more delicate and sensible approach to context. But the city would only accept the project with the Gehry -- such a provincial approach and so unnecessary given the magnitude and quality of Maja´s project. Frank Gerhy is a hostage to his reputation and fame.

The masterplan is really the opposite idea to the intersection. It is a much more aggressive approach that tries to impose how a big area should be from the start. They work well for campus planning for example – since the program, even if multifaceted, is really one. Arles and Chicago are a hybrid between the intersection and campus planning, given the many different buildings they have. They are not one single intervention, but a small series of structures interconnected within a cultural program. But since their scope of action is really regional, I see them as a singular strategy, that will set off urbanistic and economic growth for the city and the region. In Arles you do have a core campus but also some buildings spread throughout the city. The Obama Presidential Center is more of an intersection in that it is all contained within a park and will affect the transformation and growth of the neighborhood it seats in.

Masterplans for urban areas, plan that growth ahead, and fail more often than not. They are just so hurtful at so many levels. It’s a very modern idea, very naïve and sort of egomaniac. Just think of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris and you get the idea, although in Corbusier´s defense I will say he was a child (in his twenties) when he came with it. He was an amazing architect and artist, but in urban planning he was more like Godzilla. The French author Michel Houellebecq calls him a totalitarian 😊.  

In urban areas, masterplans normally tend to hurt and displace entire populations and erode the social ties and the life of entire communities. Robert Moses is the best example – University Place in New York is like a fort in the middle of the city, breaking its continuity and fabric. You have to walk around it every time; and just imagine the hundreds of people it forced out the city center; or San Juan Hill, the biggest and culturally richest black neighborhood in New York that got completely bulldozed (why we talk about the Harlem Renaissance is because they all moved there) to build the Lincoln Center complex that urbanistically never really worked either (DS+R’s recent renovation of it is most successful in its urban connectivity and opening up to the city; which was the main reason for its renovation).

All this Urban Renewal business has done more damage than good to this country. It turned it into a country for cars rather than for people, with the dismantling of an amazing national railroad system and the exodus to suburbia. It was used as a segregation and speculative machine – the car, the oil, the building and the advertisement industries completely took over the nation and its landscape. A very poignant book from the period, “God’s own Junkyard” (1964) by Peter Blake, subtitled “The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape” is reacting to 20 years of this debacle. If he would take a trip today around the country outside of the cities, he would suicide. It’s really ALL junk. Let me copy the first paragraph of his preface:

“This book is not written in anger. It is written in fury – though not, I trust, in blind fury. It is a deliberate attack upon all those who already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain, and are engaged in befouling the rest.” [15]

Private gain or profit – the capitalist Holy Grail -- is the key to everything that is not working in the USA. From racism to the deterioration of everything – values, landscape, middle class, you name it. Peter continues on his preface:

“A very cynical acquaintance of mine said to me recently: ‘The national purpose of the United States, from the very beginning, has been to let everyone make as much money as he possibly can. If they found oil under St. Patrick’s Cathedral, they would put a derrick smack in the center of the nave, and nobody would give the matter a second thought.’” [16]

A single project or architecture intervention has its profits sort of limited; the bigger the investment, the larger the margin potentially. So it is easy to see how much more profitable for a group of people is to develop a whole neighborhood in contrast with an intersection. Robert Moses had a great idea to maximize profits, why don’t we let whole neighborhoods deteriorate, we then declare them slums and so we don’t have to pay anything or barely for the land! What a great idea…. Social impact? What’s that?

“This is perhaps a rather naïve book [Blake continues]. It is based on the assumption that our national purpose, or purposes, are somewhat more idealistic.” [17]

Venturi & Scott Brown (VSB) published in 1972 Learning from Las Vegas, which was in way a response to this book and to the proliferation of the car culture landscape and the new urban and suburban conditions it was generating. They chose Las Vegas because Los Angeles – the epitome car city -- was too big to study. Las Vegas at the time was small, a strip, and had every element characteristic of this new urban paradigm.

Instead of being furious and naïve, they decided to accept what is and to work with it. It was just an urban study but the profession trashed them so much for publishing this book; more because of its title really. How could we “learn” anything from Vegas? It’s funny to hear Rem Koolhaas at the Architectural Association in London in the Rally symposium when he was a student in the 70s, confronting them and calling them reactionary and snobs for such a publication. All his later books are modeled on LLV and most his clients are now the reactionaries he once criticized so strongly 😊 Whereas Bob and Denise never made it commercially big, as Rem is doing now, because they were not Corporate America´s types. They did mostly academic buildings, because that’s who they were. Architects look like their clients in general. Rem, in words of Dan Graham, is the new Philip Johnson. But guess who the moderator of that symposium was? Charles Jencks! Who went on to write that awful book of misunderstandings.

Bob and Denise made the Las Vegas study to try to find solutions to this mess, to work with it. Ignoring it didn’t seem like a plausible solution seeing how the West Coast was developing. They were humanists, trying to understand this new landscape built around the car. Their next study who never got published was called “Learning from Levittown” (LLT) and John Rauch, Bob’s initial partner at the firm strongly refused to have it print, seeing the damage LLV was doing to their architecture commissions. It is a pity it didn’t because it was the perfect complement to LLV. If LLV is about the car, (LLT) was about the suburban home – the final destination. Rauch was right though; in that it would have infuriated the architecture profession. The precise reason why it should have been published. It was touching upon a disturbing reality for modern architects. Mainly that Americans did not like modern architecture. Corporate America loved it because when badly done it can be extremely cheap. Who needs ornament? Well, it turns out everybody in Levittown and Suburbia in general looove ornament and stucco 😊  

It’s as if somewhere along the early postwar years, it was decided people were not part of the equation anymore. The new wealthy industrialists and car manufacturers made immensely rich with the war decided to start playing Monopoli. The exodus to Suburbia coupled with urban renewal plans (or Negro Removal as James Baldwin brilliantly said) left many cities almost bankrupt, allowing for the second wave of speculation when cities got bought for a buck. In New York for example guess who profited from this? Donald Trump! When do you think he bought the land for his Trump Tower in New York? These are the people who bought America´s derelict cities. I really can´t understand how he managed to go bankrupt 6 times, honestly.

When Barack starts working in Chicago in the 1980’s he is very inspired by the then black mayor Harold Washington – the first black person to be elected as the city’s mayor in 1983 -- who was empowering black communities with such success and had a multiracial coalition of supporters. He wanted to be part of that process and learn from his experience and example. Unfortunately the mayor died young, very soon after Obama started his work. Altgeld, one of the poorest housing projects built by the CHA in the South of Chicago is 97% black. Named the “toxic donut,” it has the highest cancer rate in Chicago. 50 landfills and 382 industrial facilities surround the area, with many sites unregulated and with 250 leaking underground storage tanks.

The question is what kind of government builds social housing to house human beings in a dump? What kind of people make these decisions? And how are human beings supposed to thrive in such conditions? Who are our cities for? Rich billionaires who bought the city for a dime? Is it this the kind of society we have become? Is this what progress means?

I believe we are at a crucial point as species. Or we get more solidary towards each other or we are done. We’ll have these mega sociopaths running the world, only caring about their greedy profits and themselves, they’ll ruin the planet, eat up all of our resources and create havoc and death. This is happening already. The United States, the protectors of Democracy are even throwing that by the window. At least that is what Republicans are doing.

And here comes Obama, with a project as ambitious as Maja Hoffman’s LUMA Foundation in Arles but for the poorest area of Chicago! This is probably a first of its kind. You can build Altgeld or you can build this! And without the Gehry 😊 This is a great argument to understand why black people, lantinx, Asian and women in general need to get to positions of power. As the Constitution says if I remember well, everybody needs to be represented by our politicians; not only Corporate America, which is male, white, rich and racist – and a small percentage of the overall population. They made this country on the backs of exploitation, heralding democracy and freedom. These were very good ideals that need to get extended to everybody.

Power always corrupts, but when you don’t care to destroy a nation and democracy in order to keep it, it´s when it is time to empower other people. I believe progress is human progress, and these people who support a Donald Trump for president, are definitely going backwards – a sign of the end of their sovereignty. As Machiavelli wrote in his famous book about power, it never stays in one place. I have this metaphor for White Supremacy – a fish gasping for air outside of the water on a concrete floor. He is very active and desperate, clinging to his very life, but it’s the end.

I consider the Obama Presidential Center project an intersection because of the area of impact it is reaching. It must definitely have a masterplan, but it’s more like Campus Planning since it is seating in a Park and is a complex of buildings, all under the Obama Foundation’s umbrella.

Just imagine the impact this project is going to have for the area. It’s going to create a tidal wave of regeneration and growth. This is why it is an intersection, it’s just a seed. A big one.

If you read his book, you’ll remember how he was saying children in Altgeld grew up without ever seeing a garden… Well, the project seats in one of the most beautiful parks in town, designed by Olmstead – Central Park (NY) and Prospect Park (NY). It’s like if Central Park was moved now to South Bronx.

The key aspect of this venture is its social motivator. It’s all destined first and foremost to the local population, starting with giving them a sense of pride, which is so important for self-improvement. They deserve these facilities and an easy access to the park. No one should live in a place like Altgeld. But when the culture tells you over and over again that this is what you deserve you end up believing it. And as Barack writes, they start giving up and thus stop fighting for their rights. This project is going also to put them on the map at a national and international level. People from across the city, the country and the world are going to come to their neighborhood, because they have something to offer of international appeal. This is going to start diluting and effacing the segregation barrier, anchoring back the area to the city. Chicago tourists are going to go to The Chicago Art Institute and all the other museums in the “Magnificent Mile” and then they are going to drive south to the Obama Presidential Center. This in turn is going to ideally generate a lot of local small commerce and a new economy for the area. Just like the Guggenheim did in Bilbao.

The only danger here, that I am sure they already have thought about a thousand times, is gentrification. Gentrification is not always so bad. When done carefully and in small doses, it does improve neighborhoods’ conditions and bring a mix of people of different social and economic backgrounds that enliven communities. The type of mixture Michelle was talking about existed in her neighborhood when she was little, only a mile away from the site. It would do good here as long as it is controlled and very careful not to hurt the local population by raising rents to long term residents and evicting tenants. In this case a small dose of gentrification would eliminate the stigma of segregation I feel.

The key is that real state owners in the area become also conscious of that. At the end it is the communities that save themselves or sell themselves, and apparently there is going to be some sort of economic support provided to rentals and home owners. A little protectionism might be necessary indeed, given market laws. The city has agreed to multiply affordable housing measures under the Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance to avoid displacements. This issue should be monitored all along, for years to come after the complex is finished, because here lays the success of its mission as the first world class infrastructure destined to the most vulnerable in the hypercapitalist era. It’s almost a miracle.

I can’t stress enough how pioneering this is, and how important its success as potential model for other places. Maybe not at this same exuberant scale, but the Modern Movement in Europe was all about this, improving the living conditions of society’s most vulnerable people affected by the war. It turned sour when the capitalist forces in the US transformed it into a style for corporate America first, and the world followed. But the early Modern Movement in Europe and its African and Latin American exports (due to the Nazi persecution of its first generation) is plagued with examples – not always successful – of very socially conscious architecture and urban projects. The world back then was much more solidary than it is today. Annabelle Selldorf says that more and more the job of an architect is of a façade designer – almost a fashion designer. But projects like this demonstrate that this is not always the case. There’s still hope for architecture.

Back then, those opportunities were made available by government initiatives. This is why the Pruitt Iggoe myth that Jencks so stupidly disseminated, gave private powers the perfect excuse to end with social initiatives of a certain magnitude.

Despite the naïveté of modern urban planners like Corbusier and many others in the CIAM group, their cause was the right one – just like the text of the US Democracy was also the right one, despite its injustices at inception. It just takes us a lot of time to do the right thing, apparently. But we are getting there! A century later maybe we have learnt from their urban and architecture ingenuities and mistakes, and we can do a better job in helping improve urban conditions and the lives of people. The problem is that there are not so many opportunities now to do so. It is the private sector that builds today at this scale and they are more often than not interested solely in their profits.

This is why this project in Chicago, once more, is so unique. I don’t know if it can be a model, but it might. There is a younger generation of entrepreneurs that have grown seeing the damage the older generation of greedy capitalists are doing to the planet and its inhabitants, and are creating business models that are profitable and socially conscious. They are our only hope if we are going to stay with capitalism and not destroy ourselves. In 20 years this is the generation that will be in power. But then you have young people like Mark Zuckerberg too, who sold the US elections to Russian interference and is making money empowering autocrats throughout the world via Facebook algorithms’. So who knows … Maybe we are just this idiotic.

***

But anyway, let’s now dive into the architecture and the program itself. This is a campus for the community and built in partnership with the community. The building of this entire infrastructure alone, is going to generate many jobs at many different levels that are targeted to the local population. So already from the start it is very conscious of its mission – bringing jobs while empowering the local community, which consists mainly of people of color. As the mayor of Chicago since 2019 Lory Lightfoot, who is black and lesbian, was saying on a video on the Obama social media platforms “we are going to see a real rejuvenation and transformation of the area immediately surrounding the Obama Presidential Center,” of which the improvement of its transportation system and connectivity to the city and the area as a whole is such a key aspect of it and a legacy to the city for years to come. 

The program itself consists of a world class museum that celebrates this nation’s first black president, a library, a Forum building and an athletic center, tons of public space and the Park. The architects are Tod Williams Billie Tsien (TWBT) from New York together with Interactive Design Architects from Chicago. I am happy for TWBT whose Folk Museum in New York was demolished to make room for DS+R´s MoMA´s last expansion. It was maybe a necessary move, but quite aggressive none the less. Life has its way to sort things out 😊 

The Museum, the beacon and lighthouse of the complex, embodies the idea of ascension in its tower-like structure – symbolizing a movement upward from the grassroots. A totem-like building that can be seen from a distance, allows for an easy access and helps navigate the visitor, always knowing where he is in relation to it. Without being “spectacular”, in the bad sense of the word (as a spectacle), and economically taxing, it is elegant and opaque, with a sculptural quality that seats very well in a park. It reminds me in a way to the Beuys stone sculptures disseminated around Chelsea (NY). A very nice moment in the building façade, and the only opening in it (besides its vertical circulation area), is the text art intervention in the form of a chiseled lattice into the stone. The stone lattice takes the shape of a fragment from Barack’s 2015 Selma speech, which says:

“YOU ARE AMERICA UNCONSTRAIN-

ED BY HABIT AND CONVENTION

UNENCUMBERED BY WHAT IS REA-

DY TO SEIZE WHAT OUGHT TO

BE FOR EVERYWHERE IN THIS

COUNTRY THERE ARE FIRST STEPS

TO BE TAKEN THERE IS NEW GROU-

ND TO COVER THERE ARE MORE

BRIDGES TO BE CROSSED AMERICA

S NOT THE PROJECT OF ANY ONE

PERSON THE SINGLE MOST POWER-

FUL WORD IN OUR DEMOCRACY

IS THE WORD WE YES PEOPLE

WE SHALL OVERCOME YES WE CAN

THAT WORD IS OWED BY NO ONE

IT BELONGS TO EVERYONE OF

WHAT A GLORIOUS TASK WE ARE GI-

VEN TO CONTINUALLY TRY TO IM-

PROVE THIS GREAT NATION OF OURS”

(as read from the 3D render…)

ALREADY GOING UP !!!

By being the only event in the building’s facade – apart of its elegant stoney geometry – it becomes a very important element. The text talks about Democracy and America’s project, and its location on the upper area, above the trees, reads almost like a three-dimensional tattoo on the skin of the building. When night comes, the light behind the lattice will project even stronger the content of the text as a literal lighthouse for the entire city -- Democracy and Civil Rights as the guiding light for the city of Chicago and the country as a whole. I ignore the program of the building exactly and its interior architecture, but it will also provide very nice vistas onto the city from these upper floors. Maybe this is what they call in their site the “sky room.”

On the inside they plan to showcase American history in FULL. The time has come! And I would think a lot of black artists and other minorities’ art who only very recently are starting to be shown in mainstream art museums and galleries throughout the country will be given center stage here. It is surprising to see how much art there is in fact.

This Campus wouldn’t be Obama without a library, not inside the Museum, but a building of its own with a garden rooftop and all. The Library will actually be a branch of the Chicago Public Library and so will be open to everybody and will bring a strong player into play. This is no private dream, but a very conscious project to improve access to education and culture for people who are systematically left behind. We all know too well the implications that have cutting access to education and culture to people. Black people know it too well – it was illegal for slaves to read – and women do to. The best way to assure a certain population doesn’t develop and get strong is by limiting or denying them education (a reason why public education in this nation is so bad; it’s the first form of segregation and the most effective). This is why this library building is almost as important as the museum.

A third building is the Forum building, a mix-programme facility more professionally oriented, with broadcasting and recording studios, an auditorium, learning and meeting places and a restaurant. Who knows what will come out of here 😊 But I can see seminars, conferences and symposiums happening, at the same time as daily working operation in the fields of the audiovisual. And I imagine music will be a strong force in their program, since it is one of the biggest contributions of the black community to American culture.

The last building is an Athletic and Activity Center. Again, Sports is an integral part of black culture and the United States, whose best athletes are more often than not black. Sports has also been instrumental in giving young people a sense of belonging and community, while teaching them values that are very useful for participating in society. It has taken kids out from the streets when books couldn’t do it. After all, as kids, we learn a lot about how to behave in society by playing -- and team sports and engaging in healthy competition is a big tool for that. And lastly it is a way to stay healthy as well; specially for a community whose health problems due to social and economic inequalities are way bigger than for white Americans. And we have seen this in the Covid crisis.

So we have a museum for history and culture, a library for learning and education, a forum center for professional exposure, sharing and creating value, music and sports. The synergy all these programs are going to generate cannot be even imagined right now. And this is just a very superficial overview I gathered from their website! I know somewhere in there, there’s a place for healthier food habits, since Michelle has been since her years in the White House working in this field and continues with initiatives like her children’s TV program “Waffles & Mochi,” among many other things. 

All of this seats in one of the greatest parks of the city with waterfront access. In fact, in the community meetings, they’ve had to create the program, it was very important for the community to have lakefront access and wanted ways to improve the park. They wanted new baseball diamonds and even a dog park. Many users will come on a daily basis to enjoy the park and all the new public spaces that will be created, with scenic views, paths, jog routes, etc. The project is going to create more than five acres of Greenland and restore Jackson Park to its original aspirations of 1871.   

***

The potential of this project is gigantic. Good ideas have always ripple effects and the growth and development that it’s going to represent for the South Side of Chicago – and for the city itself -- we don’t even know yet. $174 millions in funding are coming from the State. The rest, cause this costs way more than this, must come from private investors and donations, I would guess. In 2018, during the Trump administration, a non-profit (not even worth mention) sued the city of Chicago to halt the project. The federal review process slowed down during the last four years, corresponding to the presidency of a real state guy who puts his name in everything he builds, this time, YES, for pure ego.

The Republican party and whoever else with power that have tried to stop this project from happening are precisely the people that are endangering democracy and want to perpetuate a system of White Supremacy, where access to the fruits of everybody’s work and participation are only enjoyed by them. This endemic racism is at the chore of everything that is not working in this country; with its politics of hate and violence. It is rotting this nation from the inside. Maybe in 1788 they were the majority, but today they are not, and this is why it is getting very ugly out there. Suddenly their constitution is failing them and they’re willing to send it pasture in order to keep their power.

Of course this “ain’t happening” because WE is the majority now and it is time to fully realize the EQUALITY OF CONDITIONS and opportunities (which is the same thing) that they wrote more than 300 years ago. And a project like this is precisely what it is doing and why they tried to stop it for years. But you cannot stop real progress. You can slow it down, but history has shown us time and again how at the end truth and social advancement prevail. Love conquers hate every time. Or we simply wouldn’t be here.

The Obama Presidential Center is breaking ground this fall and I can’t wait to see it grow.

[1] Lester K. Spence

[2] Idem

[3] Jennifer A. Gonzalez -

[4] Pascal Gielen p155

[5] Idem

[6] Idem

[7] Jane Meyer, Dark Money pxx

[8] Idem

[9] Idem

[10] Michelle Obama, Becoming

[11] Idem

[12] Charles Jencks

[13] The Myth of Pruitt Iggoe (201…) by x & Y

[14] Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father

[15] Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard, p7

[16] Idem

[17] Idem