"The center’s mixed messaging is incarnated in the Janus-faced facade of the tower whose eccentric cuts and grooves from some angles..."

"... can bring to mind the heroic architecture of Louis Kahn or a Noguchi sculpture. When sunlight after a rain turns the gray stone pink, the building can look like a beacon. But from other angles, it’s cold and forbidding. That’s a jarring vibe for a project whose most groundbreaking ambition is to reimagine the presidential library as a warm, welcoming community hub.... From the street the carved granite words from Selma are illegible, the lettering bunched together like Cheerios in a box. Standing just below it in Jackson Park, the tower looms like a castle keep, its mass and height in tension with the park’s pastoral beauty and origins...."

Writes the NYT architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, in "Obama Center’s Two Sides: A Lovely Park and a Forbidding Tower/In Chicago, the $850 million Obama Presidential Center aims to remake a neighborhood with a 19.3-acre community hub and a brooding 225-foot museum." (NYT).