GOD AND ‘BAM AT YALE:
I wonder if the person who took that photo realizes that he recreated the terrifying juxtaposition brutalist architect Louis Kahn created in 1949 with his infamous addition to the Yale Center for British Art?
As James Lileks wrote earlier this year:
Ah yes. That one. The building that gave us one of the best examples of life before and after the Second World War.
Hint: Kahn’s building is on the left.
You know how many years separate those two structures?
Nineteen.
The building on the right was completed in 1928. The building on the left was begun in 1947.
In From Bauhaus To Our House, Yale man Tom Wolfe wrote, “Baffled but somehow intimidated, as if by Cagliostro or a Jacmel hoongan, the Yale administration yielded to the destiny of architecture and took it like a man. Administrators, directors, boards of trustees, municipal committees, and executive officers have been taking it like men ever since.”
In contrast though, the architects for the Obama Presidential Center didn’t originally want to put a Death Star flak tower in Chicago:
Consider the fact that architect Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s original proposal was a more horizontal affair: a low-lying campus of museum, forum, and library buildings spread across the lakefront park, restrained in the way their firm’s work usually is. (One architecture critic called their work “confident buildings, but not boastful ones. They have a way of insinuating themselves into the landscape, behaving as if they’ve always been there.”)
“The tower wants to be humble, but not so humble that anyone might miss it from the highway.”
Obama sent them back, saying he wanted something “iconic.” The Obamausoleum is the result of the ex-president becoming the shadow architect, the built expression of a client who had once seriously considered becoming an architect before settling for the presidency instead. “He made many good suggestions, and he made a few not so good suggestions,” Tsien told the Chicago Tribune. This is a fascinating revelation, because it captures the barely concealed vanity of the whole enterprise.
Everything at the center ultimately bends back toward the former president, from the exhibits narrating Obama’s rise from subject of earnest hand-drawn campaign posters to gray-haired statesman, culminating in a full-scale replica of his Oval Office circa 2014, where visitors are invited to sit at the desk and take a photograph. The references to the Civil Rights Movement, community organizing, the future, and the children: all of it is arranged around the central fact of Obama’s historical importance. The tower wants to be humble, but not so humble that anyone might miss it from the highway.
Since 2016, Obama has seemed to barely even pay lip service to politics. Consider the soft-focus cultural project that has defined his post-presidency. “There is nothing more pathetic in life than a former president,” John Quincy Adams once supposedly said, which is easy to say when you then spend almost 20 years in Congress making yourself useful. William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the United States. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Jimmy Carter turned his post-presidency into a rebuke of his presidency, including numerous attempts to safeguard foreign elections. Obama has settled for something like curator-in-chief of his post-presidential decades. The Netflix deals, the Bruce Springsteen podcast, the memoirs, the music playlists, the book lists, are premised on the idea that America’s problems are fundamentally narrative rather than structural, that the right stories, the right voices, the right cultural institutions can do the work that policy apparently couldn’t.
But now in 2026, the thinness of that philosophy is hard to ignore. The end of the end of history is here, and we’ve seen politics roar back, even with a Democratic president in the form of Joe Biden’s big post-COVID restructuring of the economy. Now that Trump is restored, Obamacare is fraying, the courts have been remade, and the Democratic Party has been reduced to relying on the courts to save its legislative wins of the past from the rubble; there is little left of Obama’s legacy to grasp onto other than 2010s nostalgia.
In his 1965 book, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius (1883-1969) wrote:
Can the real nature and significance of the New Architecture be conveyed in words? If I am to attempt to answer this question it must needs be in the form of an analysis of my own work, my own thoughts and discoveries. I hope, therefore, that a short account of my personal evolution as an architect will enable the reader to discern its basic characteristics for himself.
A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling.
I dunno, Walter. Judging by the juxtapositions in the photos above with two brutalist buildings spanning 80 years, “the morphology of dead styles” looks to have been frozen in amber for quite some time. “Start from Zero” was Gropius’ slogan at the Bauhaus of the 1920s. A century later, when do we move past the starting line?
Still though, should do wonders for tourism:
Exit quote from Maher: “Really?! You’re a bunch of f*cking liars, you are. You’re not going to the Obama library.” If you do go, make sure to bring your ID:
