Obama Building $500 Million Library: Stone Structure With Bulge

Former President Barack Obama's presidential library is expected to break the mold of his predecessors, with a huge complex planned on Chicago's South Side that's estimated to cost $500 million, the Financial Times reported.

The "Obama Presidential Center" has "raised a few eyebrows," FT reported. The proposal on the table is a "stone-clad tower" with a bulge, making it possibly the most visible of any presidential library.

Yet, its location in Jackson Park is intended to weave it in with the community; a place where kids would play in the park and people might come for cookouts, FT reported.

"Obama's idea of what a presidential library might do also is far more ambitious than anything envisaged by his predecessors," FT's Edwin Heathcote writes.

"This, he proposes, should be a community library as well as a presidential one. It will not be an archive in any traditional sense: records will be digital only, and it is intended to function as a public educ­ational institution."

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