FROM BAUHAUS TO BARRY’S HOUSE: The Obama Library Is Ugly for a Reason.
Like everything having to do with Obama, it started at one price — $500 million — but then the cost of it ballooned. Now it’s at $830 million. Sounds like the Affordable Care Act that was never affordable.
As I noted, it has to be one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of the dismal gray buildings of the Soviet Union or some dystopian prison. Some compared it to the “Death Star” of Star Wars.
But now the Obama team is explaining why it looks the way it does.
The odd design of former President Barack Obama’s new presidential center is supposed to evoke unity and not Darth Vader, according to an Obama Foundation official, who explained the bizarre look of the austere building.
The $830 million monolith — slated to open in Chicago next year — has drawn comparisons to the “Death Star” on social media, and some locals have described it as a “concrete tomb” and a “monstrosity.”
“The shape of the building was actually meant to mimic four hands coming together to show the importance of our collective action,” Obama Foundation Deputy Director Kim Patterson told CBS Chicago.
So I have a question. Is there anything in that building that comes close to looking like four hands? It just looks like a gray blob.
You mean it’s supposed to convey some esoteric greater meaning that no one is getting? Well, that’s certainly emblematic of Barack Obama.
Brutalism as a style made some sense in postwar France, where steel was scarce, but concrete wasn’t. But of course, for Le Corbusier, the real fun was plopping down a box that would look hideous unless you learned the code behind it. (Of course, for all but Corbu’s true believers, that style still looks hideous even when you do know the mindset behind it. Perhaps even more so.)
In his 2002 review of C.P. Snow’s 1959 book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Orrin Judd of the Brothers Judd blog wrote:
As Snow notes, as late as say the 1850s, any reasonably well-educated, well-read, inquisitive man could speak knowledgeably about both science and the arts. Man knew little enough that it was still possible for one to know nearly everything that was known and to have been exposed to all the religion, art, history–culture in general–that mattered. But then with the pure science revolution of which Snow spoke–in biology and chemistry, but most of all in physics–suddenly a great deal of specialized training and education was necessary before one could be knowledgeable in each field. Like priests of some ancient cult, scientists were separated out from the mass of men, elevated above them by their access to secret knowledge. Even more annoying was the fact that even though they had moved beyond what the rest of us could readily understand, they could still listen to Bach or read Shakespeare and discuss it intelligently. The reaction of their peers in the arts, or those who had been their peers, was to make their own fields of expertise as obscure as possible. If Picasso couldn’t understand particle physics, he sure as hell wasn’t going to paint anything comprehensible, and if Joyce couldn’t pick up a scientific journal and read it, then no one was going to be able to read his books either. And so grew the two cultures, the one real, the other manufactured, but both with elaborate and often counterintuitive theories, requiring years of study.
And thus we we end up with the formulation of Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book, The Painted Word, where modern art exists almost solely to justify the theory behind it, and as Wolfe wrote, “In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”
Or a building. I’m sure the Obama Library looks wonderful to its architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and presumably to Barry and Michelle, but to the rest of us, it still looks like a flak tower on the Death Star.
