President Barack Obama’s presidential library is getting savaged on social media with comparisons to the Death Star, garbage bins, and other ugly monoliths in a viral thread sparked by Senator Ted Cruz.
“Locating the Death Star in Chicago was a bold move,” Cruz posted on X Tuesday while reposting a video of the latest construction work on Obama’s Chicago Presidential Center.
The facility, a slab of concrete and granite rising 225 feet above Chicago’s Jackson Park, has faced ridicule from critics since its design was first unveiled nearly 10 years ago. Cruz’s post unleashed a flood of memes from users.
“This makes me want to cling to my religion and my guns,” Conservative Political Action Conference Chair Matt Schlapp wrote.
“It’s kind of…ugly,” Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York wrote on X.
Other users compared the building to trash receptacles, Oscar the Grouch’s can and the Eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings.
“Looks like a house the villain would live in, in a Roald Dahl children’s novel,” one user posted. Another wrote, “It’s an ‘obamanation’! Just like his presidency!”
Take a look —
I have one in my neighborhood too pic.twitter.com/9a8gVl8EXT
— Americana (@Jaguarstopandas) October 14, 2025
— Grace (@DCPCJF) October 14, 2025
— My Christian Page (@MCPonX) October 14, 2025
— Amalgamated Sludge (@SludgeLLC) October 14, 2025
— mooselips™ 💋 (@mooselips) October 14, 2025
“This is a monument to one man’s ego. Look at the Reagan Library. It’s beautiful. This? There are almost no windows. What are they hiding?” Steve Cortes, a longtime Chicagoan and former advisor to President Donald Trump, told the Daily Mail. “And this Brutalist cement look in a city known for its incredible architecture.”
The center has been controversial since its inception. The project will cost $830 million to build and operate in its first year, more than doubling from the original estimate of $500 million when it was first announced.
The Obama Foundation, which runs the project privately rather than through the National Archives like other presidential libraries, set a fundraising goal of $1.6 billion in 2022.
The center’s location on 19.3 acres of historic public parkland in Jackson Park has sparked debates about gentrification and displacement of longtime black residents. The project cut down 1,000 mature trees and destroyed a migratory bird habitat.
“We’re going to see rents go higher and we’re going to see families displaced,” Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor, who represents most of the area where the center is being built, told the Daily Mail. “Every time large development comes to communities, they displace the very people they say they want to improve it for.”
Community activists have reported rents rising by as much as 60 percent in the South Shore neighborhood since construction began, with investors buying up nearly a third of homes for sale. Despite this, Obama has refused to sign a community benefits agreement with South Side groups. ”
No community benefits agreement, and let’s move on,” Obama said in 2018. “If we sign with one, two, or five organizations, they’re not representing everybody on the south side. Next thing you know, you’ve got 40 or 50 organizations—all wanting to be decision makers. We’re not going to do that.”
The project has faced years of legal challenges from parks advocacy groups like Protect Our Parks, which argued the city’s agreement to lease public parkland to Obama’s private foundation violated the public trust. Federal courts have consistently ruled in favor of the Obama Foundation.
Construction on the 19.3-acre campus began in 2021 after being initially scheduled to start in late 2018. The center was originally planned for a 2021 grand opening but is now scheduled to open in spring 2026. The project has also been plagued by a $40.75 million racially charged lawsuit filed by a minority contractor against the project’s structural engineer, and a 2022 incident where construction was halted for several days after a noose was found on site.
President Donald Trump offered to help Obama with the project earlier this year.
“Look, President Obama, if he wanted help, I’d give him help because I’m a really good builder and I build on time, on budget. He’s building his library in Chicago. It’s a disaster,” Trump said. “And he wanted to be very politically correct and he didn’t use good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I love.”
The center will house a museum, digital library, conference facilities, a gymnasium, a regulation-sized NBA court, gardens, playgrounds, and a Chicago Public Library branch. It will be the first fully digitized presidential library, with the National Archives preserving hardcopies of documents at a separate facility.