BY ZACH MORTICE

The most important question related to the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago?s South Side doesn?t have that much to do with its architecture.
It is instead: What kind of landscape stewardship can a presidential museum and library offer" To be located in Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted?s Jackson Park, the project already has a heap of canonical landscape history to contend with. So can the Obama library make a great park greater"
The answer is…probably. After an initial press conference in early May, park-watchers have a few renderings and diagrams of the museum and library complex, to be designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s lantern-like Obama museum building. Image courtesy of the Obama Foundation. The landscape plan (by the lead landscape designers Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, with Site Design Group and Living Habitats) consolidates much of the complex?s new programming in a tall, lantern-shaped museum building rendered in rough-hewn masonry, a luxurious Williams and Tsien signature, leaving plenty of room for green space. It also deletes all six lanes of Cornell Drive from this section of Jackson Park, which lets the museum and library stretch farther toward a lagoon and island. (Van Valkenburgh and Site Design Group declined to comment on the preliminary design.)
When the landscape team was announced last winter, Ernest Wong, FASLA, of Site Design Group told LAM that his ...