The Obama Presidential Center will be presented to the Chicago City Council today. But its proposed siting in the city's Jackson Park will both remove acres of public land and blight Fredrick Law Olmsted's historic landscape design, argues The Cultural Landscape Foundation president Charles A Birnbaum.

Tod Williams and Billie Tsien are gifted architects. Their work displays a sensitivity to materiality that is often revelatory. A few of my favourite projects of theirs are the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla (1995) and the Cranbrook Natatorium (1999).
The former is to be celebrated especially for the masterful way it responds to its site. As Tsien succinctly stated: "Our whole thought about making places is that people can enter them without destroying the clarity of space." Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's most recent renderings of the Obama Presidential Center show the tower and altered landscape of the campus
Williams and Tsien are currently mired in a controversy not entirely of their making. They are the architects of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) in Chicago, now in the planning stages. The OPC is controversial because it is slated to be built in historic Jackson Park, which was designed in 1871 by Frederick Law Olmsted Senior, and Calvert Vaux, who also designed the world-renowned Central Park in New York City.
Jackson Park is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and, along with Washington Park and the Midway Plaisance, is part of Chic...