April 2024 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold the monument rising in Jackson Park on Chicago’s south side: the Barack Obama Presidential Library (estimated cost, $500 million). Every president since JFK has one. With all these grandiose temples to our past leaders, The USA is getting to be like Pharaonic Egypt in the time of Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaten, after an obscure sun god, and turned the kingdom’s culture upside-down not unlike the way Barack Obama has done in America, establishing the new religion of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. And it happens that after the death of Amenhotep IV-Akhenaten, Egypt was invaded by Libyan Berbers and proto-Phoenecians (“the sea people”), and pretty soon that was all she wrote for the Egypt of the Pharaohs.  Just as, maybe, this will be all she wrote for the good ol’ USA after Barak Obama’s “MiniMe,” Joe Biden, shoves 20 million illegal aliens from all over the world across the Mexican border

The ziggurat that is the central structure is the Obama museum. Goodness knows what the sprawling complex of offices outside it will be devoted to — some sort of jobs program. By the time all of this is finished, the USA will have imploded from its debt burden and its irresolvable political quarrels. When the Chinese take over, they can convert the ziggurat into the world’s biggest dim-sum parlor.

Below, a rendering of the finished project. The rectangle on the top left is a grid of words fashioned in steel. I dare you to figure out what they say. I looked hard at an enlargement and couldn’t parse it out.

Thanks to Justin J Perrault for the nomination!