Obama Center engineer reveals former presidents vision that inspired polarizing building design

CHICAGO — One of the people who helped design the towering Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s South Side told Fox News Digital that boldness was the 44th president’s goal in the construction of what has become a polarizing finished product.“The architects knew with the client that they wanted to do something bold at the top of the tower, and the vision of the speech came to life,” Chris Bird, a Washington, DC based structural engineer, told Fox News Digital just before the site opened to the public on Friday.Specifically, Bird designed the upper quadrant of the tower, comprised of quotes from various speeches delivered by Obama during his two terms in office.The 91 words wrap around a corner of the building and make for a unique look that has been both praised and ridiculed.There are 433 individual letters, which Bird said each stands at around five feet tall.“Working with the design architects and also their graphic designers to figure out how to shape and move a speech, splice it and put it on a building is actually really unprecedented,” Bird said.

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Fox News Digital spoke with more than a dozen of the thousands of people who packed the 19.3-acre campus during its public opening on Friday, who used words like “phenomenal,” “breathtaking,” “amazing,” “futuristic” and “unique” to describe the center’s design.The center has been ripped by online detractors as a “monstrous insult to architecture, a “concrete nightmare” and a “monstrosity.”But Bird is pleased by the result and undeterred by criticism.“Now that it’s complete, it feels like it really anchors this site and this neighborhood,” he said.“You kn...