The Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago needs $1.5 billion to cover construction and maintenance, much more than the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas raised in what was then considered the most expensive tribute to a former commander-in-chief. The Chicago memorial will honor the lives of the nation’s first black president and his wife, Michelle Obama.
Architectural team Tod Williams and Billie Tsien said finding that kind of cash could be difficult because Obama refused to raise money for the project while he was still in office to avoid potential conflicts of interest, the New York Post reported Sunday. The construction alone was originally expected to cost $200 million before that price tag soared to $300 million, Williams said.
“It’s not just about preserving the past. It’s about the future,” Williams said.
Williams and Tsien, a husband and wife team, have also designed the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago. Obama’s presidential library will be located at Chicago’s Jackson Park, where the 1893 World’s Fair was held and where the former first couple lived before moving to Washington. “Michelle and I are thrilled that the Obama Presidential Center will be developed in the heart of Chicago’s South Side, a community we call home and that means the world to us,” Obama said in a statement when the project was announced in July 2016. “We are proud that the center will help spur development in an urban area and we can’t wait to forge new ways to give back to the people of Chicago who have given us so much.”
A plane loaded with the first of the materials for the Obama presidential library landed in Chicago Thursday, according to the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency tasked with overseeing Obama’s records. “It contains hundreds of millions of textual, electronic and audio-visual materials and tens of thousands of presidential gifts,” said Laura Diachenko, a spokeswoman for the archives.
Bush raised more than $500 million toward his presidential library that opened in 2013 at Southern Methodist University in Texas.
Obama has stayed busy since leaving the White House in January by speaking out against President Donald Trump’s proposed ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations and encouraging protests against the new administration. He and the former first lady also have hired an agency to line up speaking gigs and oversee future book deals.
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