Review: At the Obama Center, a return to idiosyncrasy for Tod Williams and Billie Tsien

As many readers know, I have tried where possible since launching Punch List to avoid using so-called handout photos of the buildings I’m reviewing—those provided to news outlets by architects or their clients—since those exist by definition as a kind of marketing. This week marks the first time I’ve directly commissioned a photographer to shoot a new building. The images that follow are by Nathan Kirkman, who worked for many years with the architectural photographer Timothy Hursley, and are exclusive to Punch List. I’ve separately commissioned new photographs from Janna Ireland of LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries, by Peter Zumthor; those will be unveiled this Sunday, during our live event in Los Angeles. Which, by the way, is now officially sold out!

The architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who founded a firm together in New York in 1986, are not known for an enigmatic streak. If they ever possessed one, it showed up in the folded planes and hidden corners of early projects like the American Folk Art Museum in midtown Manhattan, finished in 2001 and razed by the Museum of Modern Art thirteen years later. (The firm’s website remembers that building as “an idiosyncratic home for idiosyncratic art.”) More recently the work of their office—Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, or TWBTA—has been rather sternly handsome, pairing a Breueresque material heft with crisp tailoring and the kind of omnipresent good taste and attention to detail that can become suffocating, especially at scale.

Yet TWBTA’s design for the $850 million Barack Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago, set to open June 19, is at its best in its moments of inscrutability, which is to say where it’s willing not just to tolerate but to pursue an unresolved quality. Where the monumentality of the center is worshipful—of Obama himself, of the presidency as we naively understood it pre-Trump, of photogenic and formally bold architecture as it flourished a decade ago—it falls flat. Where it’s instead sphinxlike, harder to parse and more willing to complicate the question of Obama’s legacy or the trajectory of American democracy, the architecture comes alive in surprising ways.