Originally published in Metropolis Magazine as "Possibilities over Prescriptions," this article by Marshall Brown suggests that we open up the conversation to a wider range of possibilities for the Barack Obama Presidential Library. Brown asks "Rather than narrowing the president’s choices based on race, what if the field of candidates could be expanded?"
The official process to build the Barack Obama Presidential Library has finally been launched. After years of gossip and rumors about architects and sites, this could be the moment for some intelligent and informed debate among the design community. Unfortunately, the conversation so far has been dominated by narrow prescriptions about what the library should be, who should design it, and where it should be located, as opposed to broader speculation about what it could be. So I propose that, rather than making prescriptions to the president based on a narrow set of perceived realities, we can help him by expanding the conversation and laying out a broader set of possibilities.
This will be the 14th official presidential library under the jurisdiction of the National Archives. If it’s built in Chicago, then the design standards for the Obama library will be set extremely high, given our city’s status as a world capital of modern architecture. (Full disclosure: I live and practice in Chicago.) Without exaggeration, the library could be one of the most important American building projects in the decades to come. On the other hand, the potential for disappointment is also real, given the anticipation already in the air. Of the 13 existing presidential libraries, most are unremarkable in terms of either design or urban impact. The Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, is one of the few exceptions. The campus, designed by Polshek Partnership and Hargreaves Associates, formed a new connection between downtown and North Little Rock, and is credited with catalyzing substantial development in the area. The other presidential libraries, however, are in locations either too remote or too sequestered to be much more than storehouses and monuments. So, Chicago represents an unprecedented opportunity to break the pattern of what the historian Benjamin Hufbauer has called “Presidential Temples,” and set a new standard.
