You Know It’s a Great Nickname When Both Obama Haters and Boosters Want to Claim It

They call it the Obamalisk. “They,” in this instance, being both the scores of conservative critics still fuming about the idea that a Black man became the 44th President of the United States, hoping to cast the grand opening of Barack Obama’s new presidential library as a symbol of totalitarian oppression, and also the legions of Obama boosters and curious Americans who acknowledge that the local Chicago nickname conferred on the new Presidential Center is also simply cool as hell. Both sides can be at least partially correct at once–Obama’s newly dedicated building in Jackson Park, which opens to the public tomorrow, is audacious in its design and both gaudy and stark in its appearance simultaneously, weaving in the clear influence of brutalist architecture with the geometric lines of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, one of Obama’s favorites. It does indeed look like a truncated obelisk, one where the top has perhaps been sawed off, and it comes wrapped in the words of Obama’s own speeches. Like any presidential library, it is both a gift to the public and a monument to ego, just another entry in a long series of presidential projects stretching back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, wherein powerful and wealthy men attempt to immortalize their legacy with a building. But only Barack Obama’s has a basketball court, so there.

Although to be clear, even referring to this particular project as merely a “building” is largely understating it. Obama’s presidential center is more like an entire campus, built into a site that is already absolutely redolent in history–Jackson Park was the site of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, with the neighboring Museum of Science and Industry being the fair’s last remaining original structure. As for the part of the area that now constitutes the Presidential Center, there are gardens, playgrounds for kids, and the aforementioned indoor basketball court. There’s a branch of the Chicago Public Library and a reading room with some of the President’s favorite books, where you can sit in one of his favorite reading chairs. Even those gardens are filled with a species of tulip from the Netherlands that now bears his name. At the cafeteria, you can sit and eat the family chili recipe of Michelle Obama, who along with her husband dedicated the facility this week while wearing a striking skirt featuring the portrait of her mother, Marian Robinson, a Chicago native who passed away in 2024.

We don’t need to pretend that the Obamalisk is the prettiest building ever

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— Chi Urbanist (@chiurbanist.bsky.social) 9:30 PM · Jun 2, 2026

But the main event is of course the towering Obamalisk itself, the eight story, irregularly shaped granite tower that was supposedly designed to evoke “four hands coming together and reaching upward,” which if you kind of squint, you can … nah, sorry, not seeing it. Its shape has been compared to everything from a WWII flak tower, to a Death Star turbolaser battery, to a “Klingon prison,” which is certainly evocative. Visitors can pay $30 for the pleasure of traipsing through its four floors of immersive exhibitions telling the story of Barack and Michelle, ranging from the civil rights icons that inspired them and paved the way for Barack’s political journey, to relics of their tenure in the White House. Unlike pretty much every previous presidential library, this one doesn’t actually contain Obama’s archives on site–for the first time, they’ve been fully digitized instead, and available to the public online. The project ultimately cost a staggering $850 million, raised privately through the Chicago-based non-profit Obama Foundation. There’s little doubt it’s an excessive figure, the most that any President has spent on their center/library, although sure to be immediately surpassed whenever the Obama-obsessed Donald Trump gets around to building his gold-clad one, assuming he’s not in jail by then.

One won’t find any direct references to Trump within the Obamalisk, as far as I can tell, but the place really doesn’t even need to name him in order to rebuke aspects of Trump’s presidencies. You don’t need to look any further, in fact, than one of the building’s signature exhibits, which is a precisely recreated version of the White House’s Oval Office as it existed during Obama’s presidency. You can’t look at that room without comparing it to the gaudy, intensely tacky Oval Office that now exists, covered in gold leaf and filigree, announced by some printer paper with the words “Oval Office” on it taped to the wall outside. Obama’s time capsule can’t help but remind visitors of a time when such a room implied a certain level of gravitas and statecraft that will probably never be recaptured, regardless of what the next President might choose to do with the space.

All in all, the center will hopefully represent a tourism boon for businesses on the south side of Chicago, if nothing else. Its actual message, I fear, will be too antiquated to pierce through the tough callus of cynicism that has grown in America since the relative idealism of Obama’s rise to the presidency. The word “hope” may be emblazoned all throughout the Obamalisk, but good luck actually experiencing the emotion, despite pronouncements like this one from former Obama White House advisor Valerie Jarrett: “At a time when there’s so much toxicity in the air, this kind of breathes new hope. You can come here and be inspired and hope again.”

The Obama Presidential Center opens this month and it looks ready to receive people from all over. I spent a few moments on Saturday evening capturing the campus with a fiery sunset as the backdrop. Love the warm glow from within, too

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— Nick Ulivieri (@nuphoto.com) 10:37 AM · Jun 1, 2026