The Obama Presidential Center, an $850 million monument rising 225 feet over Chicago's Jackson Park, has a new problem: nobody can read it.
Architecture critic Lee Bay spotted the issue with the building's latest addition, an engraved excerpt from Obama's 2015 Selma speech that wraps across two sides of the eight-story granite and concrete tower. When viewed from the ground, the text produces mismatched run-over lines that render the words nearly incomprehensible.
Bay posted his assessment on LinkedIn, noting that the lettering gives off "lorem ipsum vibes," a reference to the dummy placeholder text designers use before real copy is inserted.
For a project that has consumed nearly a billion dollars, the comparison stings.
The reaction online was swift and unsparing. One commenter on X captured the general sentiment:
"I gave up after developing a headache three lines from the top."
Others piled on with observations about the building's overall aesthetic. Comparisons to a "Klingon prison" and a "super max prison" circulated freely. One user, identifying as dyslexic, called the design choices alienating rather than inclusive, the Daily Mail reported. Another lamented the broader failure:
"Not ideal. It looks horrible. Chicago is the City of great architecture. Just sad."
One observer who viewed the building from the air noted that the text wraps around the west and south sides and only looks coherent from a very specific vantage point on the ground, or from above. Which raises an obvious question: who designed a public inscription meant to be read from an airplane?
A handful of defenders pushed back, with one noting the center will at least provide "a nice park for people to walk through." That is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the architecture itself.
The Obama Foundation has framed the center as something far grander than a presidential archive. Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, told CBS News Chicago in December that the project would demonstrate how diversity can "better represent the community in which we're located and be a national model for how you can be inclusive and have a world-class product and a world-class operation."
"Because we believe inclusion is actually a strength."
The irony writes itself. A building branded as a beacon of inclusion features text that excludes anyone trying to read it from ground level. The 20-acre campus includes a museum with four floors of exhibits from the Obama presidency and will house an 83-foot-tall abstract glass collage by artist Julie Mehretu, inspired by African and American history. Scheduled to open in June, the center is not a traditional presidential library administered by the National Archives. It is something more ambitious and, apparently, less functional.
The text itself is drawn from Obama's 2015 speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, a genuinely significant moment in American history. The excerpt includes lines about the word "We" being "owned by no one" and belonging to everyone, along with references to "We The People," "We Shall Overcome," and "Yes We Can."
It is a speech worth memorializing. Which makes the execution all the more baffling. If you're going to carve words into a building that costs upwards of $850 million, readability seems like a reasonable baseline expectation. The tight leading, broken words, and lines wrapping unpredictably across two faces of the structure turn what should be an inviting public message into a puzzle.
Chicago's architectural legacy is among the finest in the world. This is the city of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. The skyline itself is a monument to the idea that buildings can be both serious and beautiful. Jackson Park, the center's home, sits in a neighborhood that was promised this project would be transformative.
Jarrett spoke about hoping visitors would "learn about President Obama and the people upon whose shoulders he stands, but also a little bit something about themselves and how they can go and bring change home to their own communities." Noble words. But the first thing visitors will encounter is a looming tower with text they cannot make sense of.
There is something fitting about a project so consumed with messaging that it forgot to make the message legible. The Obama Presidential Center set out to be a symbol. It achieved that, just not the one its designers intended.
Eight hundred and fifty million dollars, and they couldn't get the font right.