CHICAGO — A key contributor to the design of the soaring Barack Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side told Fox News Digital that the 44th president wanted the project to make a bold statement — an ambition reflected in a finished structure that has drawn both admiration and criticism.
“The architects understood, along with the client, that they wanted to create something daring at the top of the tower, and the idea of the speech really took shape,” Chris Bird, a Washington, D.C.-based structural engineer, told Fox News Digital shortly before the campus opened to the public Friday.
Bird was responsible for designing the tower’s upper section, which features excerpts from several speeches Obama delivered during his two terms in the White House.
The 91-word installation curves around one corner of the building, creating a distinctive visual element that has generated both praise and mockery.
In all, the display includes 433 separate letters, each measuring roughly five feet tall, according to Bird.
“Collaborating with the design architects and their graphic designers to determine how to shape a speech, break it apart and place it on a building was truly unprecedented,” Bird said.
“In my view, there’s no real architectural precedent.”
Fox News Digital spoke with more than a dozen attendees among the thousands who filled the 19.3-acre campus for Friday’s public opening, with visitors describing the center’s design as “phenomenal,” “breathtaking,” “amazing,” “futuristic” and “unique.”
ALSO READ: Democrats Gather for Grand Opening of Obama Presidential Library
The center has been ripped by online detractors as a “monstrous insult to architecture, a “concrete nightmare” and a “monstrosity.”
But Bird is pleased by the result and undeterred by criticism.
“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.
Bird certainly disagrees with the characterization that the building is a “monstrosity.”
“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.”
