Inscriptions and Architecture
In a few weeks, the Barack Obama Foundation’s cultural center is scheduled to open near the University of Chicago. The complex will include a library, museum, educational and sports facilities, and landscaped public spaces. Its design followed a major selection process: from an initial field of 140 architecture practices, seven were shortlisted -among them, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Renzo Piano, Snøhetta, and others -before the commission was ultimately awarded to Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Interactive Design Architects.
In recent weeks, public attention has turned mainly to the Obama Tower, the building that dominates the complex in both height and form. The tower is a prismatic granite-clad volume, part of whose surface is inscribed with an excerpt from one of the former president’s speeches: “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we’. ‘We The People’. ‘We Shall Overcome’. ‘Yes We Can.’” Obama’s insistence that architecture should incorporate speech — that text should become part of the composition of the façade rather than an applied, and therefore removable, element -has already attracted a range of responses. In a traditional Greek newspaper, a respected columnist criticised the gesture as vain, interpreting it as a desire to have Obama’s words “carved in stone”, visible from afar and preserved “for centuries” as a monument to his thought- or, more precisely, to himself.
Long before the invention of printing, architecture carried narrative and meaning largely through sculptural decoration. Buildings functioned, in this sense, as some of humanity’s earliest “books”. Victor Hugo’s famous phrase from Notre-Dame de Paris -“Ceci tuera cela”- remains familiar, at least to historians and theorists of architecture: the printed book would kill architecture.
Today, we tend to assume that architecture produces meaning through its own means. It is no longer expected to serve as the primary vehicle for preserving and transmitting information, or for communicating a literal narrative. Yet at a time when book reading is rapidly declining, especially among younger generations, the Obama Tower brings this older question back into focus. What is the communicative power of public architecture today? And can architecture still operate as an archive -not only of memory, but also of ideology- addressed to society as a whole?
Ariadni Vozani
