As the Obama Presidential Center opens, Trump has mocked its design and cost while touting his own planned skyscraper.
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Barack Obama’s mold-breaking presidential library has divided critics, with some calling the sprawling center “audacious” and others dismissing its main building as an eyesore.
Among those not impressed: Obama’s successor.
The Obama Presidential Center Museum is “not too pretty,” President Donald Trump declared last year. A “total disaster,” he proclaimed in February. His agita increased as the Obama center’s Juneteenth opening approached; this month Trump twice posted manipulated images depicting the library, located in Chicago, as a giant trash can.
Both men have sought to build libraries that break from past precedent — and past presidents. Rather than a stand-alone museum, filled with papers and notes, Obama and his team designed a park and other community-oriented features. Trump has proposed a skyscraper for downtown Miami, depicting it in a video as a party venue, replete with two golden statues of himself.
Only one is mocking the other about it.
“A president taunting in public another president about his library isn’t something that has previously happened,” Benjamin Hufbauer, a University of Louisville professor who wrote a book on presidential libraries, wrote in an email.
It is, however, just the latest chapter in Trump’s long career of taunting and repudiating Obama — rolling back his legislation, revoking his foreign-policy deals, even moving his White House portrait to a much less prominent location. His own planned presidential library would feature a tower more than twice the size of Obama’s.
An Obama spokesman declined to comment on Trump’s latest gibes, focusing instead on the mission of the 19-acre Obama Presidential Center, which includes a basketball court, a public library and other facilities.
“It is designed to tell the story of our collective power — demonstrating that when people unite around a shared cause or mission, we can make progress, even against long odds,” Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to Obama, said in a statement.
The White House also declined to comment on Trump’s posts about Obama’s library, and instead touting Trump’s project.
“The Trump Presidential Library will be one of the most magnificent buildings in the world and a living testament to the indelible impact President Trump has made on America and its people,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Presidential libraries typically serve as highly curated museums, touting the president’s record and offering their interpretation of events that unfolded during their tenures. Both Obama and Trump have rejected that historic model — even as they take strikingly different approaches.
Obama has conceived of his Chicago campus as a museum, education and community center — harking back to his days as a community organizer in the city. The centerpiece of the project is a 225-foot-tall tower, featuring oversize words from Obama’s famous speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma, Alabama, civil rights march.
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Trump has envisioned a tall skyscraper in downtown Miami, replete with a hotel — an addition that prompted a lawsuit alleging Trump is seeking to profit off land gifted to him by state officials. The 47-story building, a height intended to evoke his status as the 47th president, would re-create Trump’s Oval Office, include a space that resembles his planned White House ballroom, and contain multiple vehicles, such as a $400 million Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar for Trump to use as Air Force One.
Blair Kamin, a retired architecture critic who has previously tangled with Trump over a large “TRUMP” sign that the real estate tycoon placed on his Chicago building, said the two projects reflect the two presidents and how they approach governing.
“Trump’s proposal is emblematic of his grift-driven presidency, because it will likely contain a Trump hotel. It will be an ostensibly public building that serves his private interests,” Kamin said. “In contrast, Obama has created a campus that is open to the public, that contains numerous features for the community” such as a vegetable garden, a sledding hill and an auditorium intended to help train future community leaders.
Kamin also noted that while both Obama and Trump are building tall buildings — “unusual in presidential libraries,” he said — the modernist Obama structure, which appears heavy and earthbound, differs from Trump’s plans for a thin, tall and glass-covered skyscraper, which resembles his existing hotels.
Both Obama and Trump have been closely involved in their projects, seeking to shape not just their legacies but the structures.
Obama, having repeatedly said he wanted to be an architect, has acknowledged that he relished the opportunity to provide design input.
“He made many good suggestions, and he made a few not so good suggestions,” Billie Tsien, a lead architect on the project, told the Chicago Tribune.
Trump, a longtime real estate developer before entering politics, has spoken repeatedly about his own love for construction projects — a dynamic playing out as he seeks to remake Washington, too.
Obama’s allies have offered their own gibes at Trump’s library. At a 2018 roundtable of architects in New York, Robert A.M. Stern, who designed George W. Bush’s presidential library, suggested that all presidents — even unpopular ones — are eventually honored by architects and designers.
“You know somebody’s going to do the Trump library,” Stern said.
“Nobody, nobody,” Tsien interjected to cheers from the crowd.
Even as Trump has mocked Obama’s project, he did gesture last year at finding common ground.
“If he wanted help, I’d give him help because I’m a really good builder and I build on time, on budget,” Trump said last year in the Oval Office. “I would love to help him with it.”
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