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Old Posted Oct 30, 2019, 2:47 PM
Via Chicago Via Chicago is offline
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: Chicago, IL
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of course its possible, anything is with the will and budget. but just saying "it should match the surrounding campus" does miss the point. look at the new African American museum in DC, and the way it too departs from its neoclassical surroundings, and how its design was influenced. look at the kind of art and music obama was into. his friendship with Theaster Gates. look at who obama commissioned to paint his/michelle's portraits at the Smithsonian. he represents the new thinking about AA history, their contributions to American society, and what it means to be Black moving forward. it should come as zero surprise his building would brake from a traditional mold. once you start peeling back the layers, you can start to make sense of where the inspirations for this building are coming from. look at the modernist architecture in major African cities and you'll start to quickly begin seeing similarities. he is a person who is VERY conscious of symbolism, and what things represent. selecting a gothic or neo-classical building would symbolize the Old, Stodgy, White, European-Influenced, Conservative, Cloistered worldview, even if he was a part of it and came out of that to some degree, thats certainly not what hes going to choose to represent his legacy.

that Obama would choose something like this, and the Bushes would choose something like this, says everything that is/was different about their ways of thinking




Last edited by Steely Dan; Oct 30, 2019 at 6:38 PM.
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