Who are Obama library architects Tod Williams, Billie Tsien?
Obama selects UCLA Architecture Alumna to design Presidential Library in Chicago
UCLA Architecture and Urban Design alumna Billie Tsien '77 (M.Arch) was selected to design the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago alongside her husband, Tod Williams. The Chicago Tribune details the architects' backgrounds. Learn more in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and KCRW's DnA podcast.
"New York City architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who on Thursday were named the architects of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, are highly regarded modernists who built their award-winning practice, as a profile of them once put it, "not on a signature style but on signature values."
Their best-known works include the Barnes Foundation art museum in Philadelphia, the demolished American Folk Art Museum in New York and the University of Chicago's Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, a spare but lively 11-story tower that grows out of a two-story base at Drexel Avenue and 60th Street.
The structures of Williams and Tsien, critic Karrie Jacobs wrote in Architect magazine in 2013, 'are confident buildings, but not boastful ones. They have a way of insinuating themselves into the landscape, behaving as if they've always been there.'"— Blair Kamin, June 30, 2016
Read the full article at the Chicago Tribune website.