Tod-Williams-Billie-Tsien-Architects

When the Obama Presidential Center dedicates its 19.3-acre campus at 6001 S. Stony Island Avenue on 18 June 2026 and opens to the public on Juneteenth, it will be the largest civic commission Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects have completed in forty years of practice — and only the sixth public-campus building they will have placed on a site they did not previously own as architects of record. The shape of the answer to “how did a small Manhattan firm best known for the demolished American Folk Art Museum end up designing a presidential museum on Chicago’s South Side?” is a forty-year arc that runs through La Jolla, Manhattan, Hong Kong, Philadelphia, Princeton and Lincoln Center, and that builds tod williams billie tsien architecture one small civic building at a time. This piece walks that arc in order. ...

The Obama Presidential Center opens to the public on Juneteenth 2026 at 6001 S Stony Island Avenue, eleven years and seven blocks north of the 1923 bank at 6760 S Stony Island that Theaster Gates restored in 2015 as the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial venue. Read together, those two addresses sketch the spine of a sustained Chicago South Side cultural patronage campaign that runs along a single avenue and binds an artist-led nonprofit, a presidential foundation and a New York architecture studio into one continuous urban project. The shape of the answer to “what happened on the South Side between 2015 and 2026?” is not a list of buildings. It is a corridor. ...