BY ZACH MORTICE
31st Street Harbor in Chicago, by Site Design Group. Image courtesy of Rose Yuen Photography.
The Obama Foundation on January 30 announced the selection of three landscape architecture firms to work on the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago?a nationally renowned firm, a regional Chicago powerhouse headed by a native South Sider, and a lesser-known firm that has worked on previous presidential library landscapes.
The New York-based Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the 2016 ASLA Landscape Architecture Firm Award recipient and designer of the landscape of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, will lead the group. Chicago?s Site Design Group joins the team, offering extensive experience with the Chicago Park District, which, controversially, turned over the presidential library?s site to the city so that it could be transferred to the Obama Foundation. Finally, Living Habitats, also based in Chicago, rounds out the team, having designed the green roof landscape of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Arkansas. These three firms will work with Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Interactive Design Architects on a narrow slice of land at the western edge of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux?s Jackson Park, the site of the 1893 World?s Fair, next to Lake Michigan. Site Design Group is a certified minority-owned business; Living Habitats is a certified woman-owned business. ?It has always been the foundation?s ...