I went to the Obama Presidential Center last week! The air quality was Not Good.
The Obama Center is basically two parts: there's a large outdoor complex of gardens, walkways, play spaces, and social areas that's free and open to the public, and I would have loved to explore that more but not at the cost of my lungs. There's also a public library branch across from the main building (the "Obamalisk") but it's quite small and feels a little like a set piece. It looks like it was designed by someone who took their interior design inspiration from libraries of the 40s and 50s, which don't get me wrong I love, all wood paneling art art deco lighting, but it also feels a little off because of that.
I have thought for a long time that the main building was pretty remarkably ugly, but at the same time that my aesthetic opinion of it wasn't really relevant to anything. I'd read a lot of critics say that it looks much better in person and one or two people say they disagreed, but this was my first time actually seeing it, and honestly I like it a lot better now. It's a truly weird building but standing before it in person, it has a kind of dark whimsical charm. It's still weird as hell and very out of place with its surroundings but in a less jarring, more artistic way than the photos portray.
The Presidential Center, inside the main building, is what I would call Very Obama. You enter and are ticketed through the ground floor, and then they route you up an escalator to the second floor where the exhibits begin. Floors 2 and 3 are...a lot of reading. Like a lot. LOTS of text on the walls, on exhibits, lots of video media too (a supporting character of this presidential center is the sign language interpreters on all the video media; they become recognizable after a while because there are only a few of them, and at one point I heard a group of women discussing which one they liked best). There are some displays of memorabilia but you'd better make sure you look while you can because once you leave a floor, getting back to it is very difficult.
The fourth floor was the most fun for me; it had miniature dioramas of White House events, an exhibit of gifts given to the Obamas while in office, several of Michelle Obama's dresses, and the Big Photo Op: a detailed full scale recreation of the Oval Office as it was in 2014, where after about a 15 minute wait in line you can sit at the presidential desk and an attendant will take your photo.
There's also a digital mural, I believe on the fifth floor (locations got a little blurry after a while) with a bank of interactive screens nearby; you can choose to listen to stories of activists making a difference in peoples' lives, and at the end sign your name to show your support and your name shows up on the mural a few seconds later. The actual mural moves, so my name floated past some trees and over towards a building in the distance, while when I entered my niece's name, hers flew through a cloud. (Amy was the lady at the monitor next to mine I think.)
I do also appreciate that the museum was COVERED in seating. Every floor had multiple wooden benches for people to sit on, so much so that there were always open seats, and I saw docents carrying folding stools as well.
From the 5th floor they ask you if you've seen all of the floors, and if you say yes, they put you in an elevator to the 8th floor, the "sky room", where you can look out through the lettering on the side of the building. It's smaller than the photos have generally made it look, but still a very dramatic way to end a tour, and I can imagine on a sunnier day it would be a very warmly lit space.
Once you're done with the Sky Room they put you in a massive freight elevator with a few dozen of your closest friends and take you down to the lower level, where the gift shop (inadequate) and the cafeteria (seems nice) are. There was also a fancier restaurant on the ground floor, but both the restaurant and the cafeteria were super crowded, so after waiting in a velvet-rope line (!!) for the gift shop and spending a grand total of $10 on a couple of postcards and buttons, I headed out. Most of the gift shop is very expensive t-shirts and enamel pins.
I'm looking forward to going back and exploring the grounds. Tickets are sold out through November and every time a new block of tickets opens they go very fast, so it was mostly luck that I got admission when I did, but I think it will also be a slightly better experience once it's been open for a few years and isn't so crowded. Trying to navigate crowds while in those first two floors especially made for a less than serene experience but overall I had a good time.
