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What Obama’s Billion Dollar Chicago Temple Will Look Like
I imagine an architect working late at night, stumped for a design for the Obama Presidential Library, eating cold take-out Kung Pao chicken. Suddenly, the carton slips out of his hands and plops upside down on the unfinished diorama. He utters a curse and leans over to pick it up. Then, he pauses and stares at the inverted Chinese food container. “A ha!” he exclaims. “I’ve got it.”
Update: Community organizers in Chicago don’t like the proposed Obama Temple Complex.
“We are concerned that rather than becoming a bold vision for urban living in the future it will soon become an object-lesson in the mistakes of the past.”
Sounds like it sums up the Obama presidency perfectly.
Published in General
Unfortunately, this caught my eye @westernchauvinist: “smut”
My God. That is the sort of structure that appears in sci-fi movies and sits inert for two weeks while The Authorities debate its intention, and then a guy in a silver jumpsuit walks down and starts talking about the Galactic Community.
But the scrappy heroes of the movie don’t trust him, because there’s something fundamentally off about the spaceship. Oh, sure, you can chalk it up to the aesthetics of a different culture, but surely the Brilliant Aliens must know how this structure connotes blunt, indifferent, uncaring authority.
It’s a perfectly predictable piece of modern architecture – ahistorical, no context to its surroundings, confident in the wisdom of the fact of its abstraction. You almost expect a Lego facehugger to spring out of the top.
A correction I was under the impression the library will go in Washington Park, but it will actually go in Jackson Park. Still the sentiment stands. In fact in Jackson Park it will stand out even more as it will be placed along side the magnificent looking Museum of Science and Industry. Modern architecture is just a drag.
I can make out “sun” and “us” twice, plus “invunth”, “vurt”, and “vpix”. Plus the very profound “uru”.
You mean it will go next to this???
I can’t believe it. Could there be a worse architectural abomination showing the decline of Western Civilization than the contrast with this? Why don’t the Obama people just drop a bomb on the Museum of Science and Industry? A smoldering gaping hole in the ground?
Gah, I hate lefty pretension and arrogance.
Of course the Museum I think looks better on the outside than on the inside, which like many Science Museums is geared too much for children. Very interactive, and basic. Not bad for a 10 year old but not enough meat for adults. So for those visiting Chicago I recommend the Field and Art Institutes be visited first before coming to lovely Hyde Park to see this museum. The U boat is neat though.
I think it’s been dumbed down a lot over the years too.
For those not aware, it’s the last surviving building from the 1893 Columbian exposition. I highly recommend reading The Devil in the White City.
Current estimate is $100 million of our tax dollars, so a bargain really for this monument to our former god-king.
Y’all should just shut up and get assimilated already. Resistance is… “not who we are,” I think was the phrase.
Trolling to commence upon ribbon cutting.
“Uh, yeah, you guys deliver?”
Ellsworth Toohey: What do you think of the new Obama library? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.
Howard Roark: But I don’t think of it.
Remember when Obama’s convention speech columns were the object of our 5-minute hate for their Olympic grandeur? No, me neither. Why not make an abominable sop to elite modernist tastes when anyone who might otherwise care about classicism or traditional forms will abominate anything with your name on it? Wake me up when the right starts to tire of petty snark. Maybe after we’re done being told that any criticism of the Trump resort and library is #NeverTrump’s last ditch attempt to deny the 2016 election. Replace black with “Outer Borough” and the party lines become interchangeable.
George Costanza fancied himself an architect as well
It is sort of hilarious to consider what Trump might decide is a fitting memorial to his Hisness.
On the other hand…Trump is Trump. No one pretends that he is some sort of gift to mankind; most people (even his supporters) roll their eyes when they say his name. Very different.
I’d be willing to forgive (well, mostly) the ugliness of the architecture if there was even an earnest effort to create something that would benefit the people in Chicago who are poor and oppressed by appalling levels of crime and violence. How about a PTSD clinic? An arts-and-crafts center? A public swimming pool and gymnasium? A magnet school for kids interested in studying Climate Change, Basketball or —what the heck—-Journalism? The tone-deafness and social blindness of the project is what gets me. Basically, I gather, (and at great expense) they are planning to take away a fairly nice park and replace it with…a useless and astonishingly unattractive…thing.
I was thinking wind power turbines.
It’s missing the Greek temple with marble columns textured to look like styrofoam.
The thing reminds me of a phased-array radar – the type of things the Soviets built for ABM guidance.
I dunno. Obama’s library looks to me to be an attempt to recreate a bombed out city from World War II – Cologne perhaps or Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Well, the new building is like a giant middle finger, especially in opposition to the style of the symmetrical, green domed complex.
What was it they kept saying, “fundamentally transform…”
I guess the O-library plan is about right.
Well, at least this assimilating-cube-thing is black…
But, where’s the chopstick? The fortune cookie?
Actually, Obama’s glorious white tableau will be a perfect canvas for the next hundred years of creative urban grafitti-tags. The stumpy square building in the foreground is where they artists buy the spray paint.
An ad that showed up:
Rush calls the Clinton version the “Clinton Library and Massage Parlor”. What shall we call the Obama version? Obama Library and Prison?
The White Kaaba?
One can only be thankful that the supply of people with more money than taste is such that Frank Gehry couldn’t fit the Obama Presidential Library folks into his schedule. We already have the Pritzker Pavilion, which looks like Ikea has gotten into the prefabricated building business and your Uncle Ned had a couple of belts before he put it together.
I’m amazed Obama approved this architectural disaster.
If donations are tax-deductible, it’s public funding.
I kind of like all the meandering sidewalks, very apropos for an administration that took a thoroughly messed up medical situation and made all the problems exponentially worse.
This was the original topic that lured me into Ricochet and should be noted (although the new reflections are also worthy):
http://ricochet.com/archives/obama-presidential-library-really-ugly/#comments
Just want to add there is a big flat building in the scheme besides the Chinese bucket part.