The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago is scheduled to open to the public on June 19, 2026, coinciding with Juneteenth. Located within Jackson Park on the city’s South Side, the 19.3-acre campus was designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in collaboration with Interactive Design Architects, with landscape architecture by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. Opening events organized by the Obama Foundation are planned between June 18 and June 21, beginning with a dedication ceremony at John Lewis Plaza, followed by the public opening of the campus and museum the following day.
The announcement was made by Barack Obama through a video message shared on social media on March 7, the anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches. A phrase from Obama’s 2015 speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the marches, beginning with the words “You Are America,” has been incorporated into the architecture of the museum tower. The text is carved into the building’s exterior façade, allowing light to pass through the cut lettering into interior spaces. From the upper level known as the Sky Room, visitors will view the surrounding cityscape through the words of the speech, connecting the building’s spatial experience with references to the civil rights movement.
The project has been conceived as a campus composed of multiple programmatic elements rather than a single institutional building. In addition to the museum tower, the development includes a forum building intended for public events and discussions, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, and facilities dedicated to community programming and youth activities. These structures are arranged around a central public plaza that functions as the primary circulation and gathering space within the campus. While each building is accessible directly from the plaza level, the structures are also connected through below-grade circulation routes that support the functioning of the complex as an integrated institution.
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Architecturally, the museum tower forms the visual focal point of the campus. Rising above the surrounding landscape, its vertical massing contrasts with the largely horizontal character of Jackson Park. The building’s stacked gallery arrangement allows the structure to maintain a relatively compact footprint on the ground while accommodating exhibition spaces above. Lower buildings, including the forum and library, are designed as horizontal volumes embedded more closely within the landscape. This distribution of height and mass organizes the campus spatially while preserving large areas of open space within the site.
The site of the Obama Presidential Center is located within a landscape with a significant architectural history. Jackson Park was originally designed in 1871 by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and later served as the primary site of the World’s Columbian Exposition. During the exposition, the park became the center of the so-called “White City,” a collection of temporary neoclassical buildings that contributed to the development of the City Beautiful movement. The new campus stands near the former locations of several fair structures, including the Woman’s Building and the Horticultural Building. The nearby Museum of Science and Industry, originally constructed as the Palace of Fine Arts, remains the only major building from the exposition and continues to function as a prominent architectural presence within the park.
Landscape design plays a central role in the organization of the campus and its relationship to the surrounding park. The landscape strategy introduces gardens, pedestrian routes, wetlands, and open lawns that extend the existing park environment across the site. These elements include a restored Women’s Garden, planted areas designed to manage stormwater, and pedestrian paths such as the Wetland Walk that connect different parts of the campus. Much of the site will remain accessible as public open space, with outdoor areas functioning as extensions of Jackson Park’s broader landscape network.
The development process of the project has unfolded over nearly a decade and has been accompanied by legal and civic debate regarding the use of public parkland. These challenges delayed the start of construction before federal courts ultimately allowed the project to proceed. The project was first announced in 2016, and groundbreaking for the campus took place in 2021, following years of planning, environmental review, and public consultation.