The Obama Presidential Center. Two hundred and twenty-five feet of gray granite with almost no windows in it, which is not how museums usually introduce themselves.
Find the corner closest to you, where the two big faces of the tower meet. It isn't square. The architects turned that corner five degrees off true, deliberately, and once you've noticed it you can't stop — the whole slab looks like it's caught mid-turn.
The architects were Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, a husband-and-wife firm out of New York who won this job against a field stacked with bigger names. Obama had handed them the National Medal of Arts a few years earlier, so they came in knowing the client. Their idea for the tower was hands — two palms coming together, the gesture you make right before you say something you mean.
You should know what kind of architects they are, because it matters. Williams and Tsien built their whole reputation on small, obsessive, beautifully made buildings. Their most loved one was th
e American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan — fifty feet wide, a facade of folded white bronze, the sort of building other architects made pilgrimages to.
The Museum of Modern Art bought it and tore it down. Twenty fourteen. MoMA wanted the lot for expansion, the profession lost its mind, petitions went around, and it came down anyway. Williams and Tsien had to watch their best work get demolished fo
