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CHICAGO — One of the people who helped design the towering Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s South Side told Fox News Digital that boldness was the 44th president’s goal in the construction of what has become a polarizing finished product.
“The architects knew with the client that they wanted to do something bold at the top of the tower, and the vision of the speech came to life,” Chris Bird, a Washington, D.C. based structural engineer told Fox News Digital just before the site opened to the public Friday.
Specifically, Bird designed the upper quadrant of the tower comprised of quotes from various speeches delivered by Obama during his two terms in office. The 91 words wrap around a corner of the building and make for a unique look that has been both praised and ridiculed. There are 433 individual letters, which Bird said each stand at around five feet tall.
The Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (L) and structural engineer Chris Bird, who helped design the building, on June 19, 2026. (Peter D’Abrosca/Fox News Digital)
“Working with the design architects and also their graphic designers to figure out how to shape and move a speech, splice it and put it on a building is actually really unprecedented,” Bird said. “There’s no architectural precedent, in my opinion.”
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Fox News Digital spoke with more than a dozen of the thousands of people who packed the 19.3 acre campus during its public opening Friday, who used words like “phenomenal,” “breathtaking,” “amazing,” “futuristic” and “unique” to describe the center’s design.
The center has been ripped by online detractors as a “monstrous insult to architecture, a “concrete nightmare” and a “monstrosity.”
The Obama Presidential Center is shown with the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit and Vegetable Garden in the foreground. (Peter D’Abrosca/Fox News Digital)
But Bird is pleased by the result and undeterred by criticism.
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“Now that it’s complete, it feels like it really anchors this site and this neighborhood,” he said. “You know, it’s able to blend in with the park in a way that’s really nice. I mean, the landscape architecture — as well as the building — the landscape architectures is incredible.”
He said it invokes emotion in the people he met during the opening festivities.
“I mean, it’s nothing but smiles and some tears sometimes. I think everyone finds a bit of themselves that they knew or didn’t know they needed here, which is really special,” he said.
Barack Obama speaks during the dedication of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Illinois. (Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)
Bird certainly disagrees with the characterization that the building is a “monstrosity.”
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“So, the tower itself is an incredible gesture in the rest of the park,” he said. “We’re reaching toward the sky, it is tall, but it’s not much taller — I mean it’s kind of matched in size by lots of the buildings around this area.”
“I think to say that it’s a monstrosity is wrong. I would say that it’s a really grand gesture and a bold statement.”
