The public’s appetite for starchitects has made the competition for President Obama’s library an ongoing, glamorous story, and on December 21 seven firms made the shortlist to present their vision of the library and foundation to the President and the First Lady. This embodiment of Obama’s legacy will be enshrined on Chicago’s South Side, a place with a rich, and fraught, history for black Americans.
The presidential library is the Kentucky Derby of architectural competitions, which means that every firm on the list (Adjaye Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, John Ronan Architects, SHoP Architects, Snøhetta, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien) is a thoroughbred. But who will win this coveted prize, and why?
A dozen years ago, when I was the managing director of the London-based architecture firm Adjaye Associates, I took a phone call from Gregg Pasquarelli, one of the cofounders of SHoP Architects. He was in London and wanted to stop by the studio to say hello. We were in our new offices on the edge of Hoxton Square and David Adjaye was weary of peers who wanted to see how he operated in his studio. So we pivoted and suggested a drink.
To my surprise, David and Gregg hit it off, an unexpected collegial camaraderie considering that their professional tracks were completely divergent. David was building a practice one project at a time, an iterative process that favors craftsmanship and details. His laser focus has resulted in a global practice that is currently unrivaled in his generation. First there were residential houses like Elektra and Dirty (London), the libraries (three in England, two in Washington, DC), then a museum (Denver), a business school (Moscow), and now the largest office park in Africa (Kampala, Uganda), along with the new building for New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem.
In the meantime, Gregg started his practice from the opposite end of the spectrum and was spending most of the studio’s time and resources on a university campus masterplan (architecture-speak for mapping out how new buildings integrate with old ones and reimagining circulation and streets). They had already garnered a reputation for being able to tackle the big picture without having realized any significant built work. They completed their first major building project just several years ago with the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, for which they made stadium-sized waves in the design world.
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Written by: Karen Wong
Photo: Courtesy of the Rebuild Foundation