Woke in Stone: A Monumental Tribute to Aesthetic Barbarism. The opening of the Obama Library.
Mon 4:42 pm +00:00, 22 Jun 2026
Source: https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/woke-in-stone-a-monumental-tribute
If you look at the Obama Presidential library building and don’t find it hideously ugly, there is something missing or wrong with your aesthetic sensibilities, and I’d even say with your soul.
This is a building that revolts every natural instinct of grace and symmetry and harmony. It has no balance. It’s not just ugly, because ugliness in architecture, as in life, is usually at least accidental or functional. Ugliness can come from something having a prosaic purpose that the maker doesn’t feel requires embellishment. And that sort of functional ugliness is off putting and could be avoided with greater thought, but isn’t deliberately sought out.
With hideousness at the scale of this building, it is being hideous that is the function. You cannot accidentally create a building as spectacularly hideous as this without its vast ugliness being your design and purpose. A huge amount of money, some say 837 million dollars, while many others predict the cost will spiral well beyond a billion, went into this project. Very expensive and prestigious architectural ‘experts’ and firms worked on this, although it is true as well that artificial limits were placed on the project via an insistence that DEI practices were followed and black individuals and contractors prioritised throughout. Still, even with that artificial constraint…..if they wanted to produce something beautiful, they had the investment and expertise to do it.
Quite obviously, then, they didn’t want beauty.
They wanted the opposite. The opposite confirms they have the power to do whatever they like, that they can ruin you and your landscape. The opposite acts as a barometer of submission and loyalty. If you can get people to endorse this, you can get them to agree to anything.
The lines of the main building confirm this. Beauty comes from proportion, balance, symmetry, from things being pleasingly reflected. We have known this and how to produce it since before the Ancient Greeks. Classical architecture knows this. Even before the Greeks and formal descriptions of aesthetic first principles, the Mesopotamians and the Ancient Egyptians produced vast monuments that were beautiful by their symmetry just as much as they were awe-inspiring by their scale. Incredibly blood thirsty empires, like the brutal Assyrians or in the New World the Aztecs, still knew how to make boulevards, temples, cities and tombs according to a harmonious plan, which despite the cruelties of the culture creating it presented at least some pleasing proportions to the eye.
In other words, the temple might include hideous torture chambers,the mural might reference the beheading of conquered tribes, but the shape of the building had majesty as well as power, beauty as well as scale, and can still be aesthetically pleasing today.
Now it might be considered unfair to compare a presidential library with the greatest monuments of antiquity. But this is the most expensive Presidential library in 250 years. Within those 250 years, Americans have built graceful, beautiful and aesthetically pleasing monuments on many occasions. Some former Presidents did so privately with far more limited means than were applied to the Obama monstrosity, a building I have seen aptly described as an ‘Obamination’.
Compare Monticello and this library, even before you compare it with the White House, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington National Cathedral, the Library of Congress, the Lincoln Memorial, or the Biltmore Estate.
Monticello is in harmony with the nature around it, and the nature most immediately around it is ordered in a way to increase this harmony. The result is beauty where the work of Man seems to flow, inevitably, from the laws of Nature.
Compare that with the grotesque confusion of the Obama library and its grounds.
Adjusted for inflation, some of the most beautiful buildings in America were built more cheaply than Obama’s library. And yet it is the only one to go beyond looking cheap and into the realms of some kind of deliberate desecration of the senses, some awful intrusion of an entirely alien aesthetic inimical to human sensibilities.
Finding analogies for this thing is easy, but finding reasons for its existence are far more difficult. We can see why it is spectacularly revolting, if we have even the slightest aesthetic training or sense. On the main building, the shape is irregular. It’s not a tower, not quite, but bulges unnaturally and in disproportionate ways, like a body that’s been crippled and the bones badly reset, or like a tree distorted with some form of parasitic lumpen growth. Parts are deliberately made to misalign with the whole. An indecipherable jumble of junk text is written in stone at the top, as if some celestial or more likely satanic pen scribbled on it.
Odd angles cast permanent shadows. The thing manages to evoke words like distorted, unbalanced, grotesque, distended or swollen as the eye sweeps around the ugly confusion and the mind tries to comprehend why anyone would create something this disgusting.
The end result is a building that looks like an alien hive ship landed on Earth, perhaps a place where the invaders from beyond the stars harvest human organs or practice experiments on us. We have seen this building, or versions of it, on a thousand of the most lurid and dystopian science fiction novel covers. This is where The Autarch lives, who send his torturer-droids out to skin alive any remaining dissidents. Or it’s the Ministry of Loving Submission. Or it’s the Ark of the Dark Lord. At the very least it’s a multi-story concrete British car park from the 1970s that has mated furiously and bitterly with a Stalinist detention centre to produce this half aborted love child.
Soviet Brutalism with a bigger budget.
The surroundings and subsidiary buildings are not much better. The smaller, more perfunctory outbuildings are possibly the least offensive to the eyes, looking merely like hastily constructed supermarkets rather than active wounds punctured in the space-time continuum. There’s an almost mocking inclusion of the elements of a serene park. There are trees. There are areas of grass. And there are walkways through the trees and the grass. But again these are designed in such a way as to destroy every element from which they are composed. The trees are pitiful and overwhelmed by the monstrosity they are arranged around. They look like terrified remainders of a captured populace, the last left standing.
And the pathways, my god the pathways …..these seem to exist to break up any sense of order in the natural world. They twist, turn, spool around like recently released intestinal tracts after a disembowelment. None of them follow natural contours or even mimic each other. The eye can’t alight on one stretch that has symmetry with another. They shatter the landscape, they scratch this way and that. From above, it looks like someone has hacked away at a school desk with a knife. One section seems like a half lidded eye or possibly a vagina. I have no idea what it must feel like to walk around that place. A maze without walls? Pointless little turns and cutbacks that seem designed solely to piss you off as you try to get from one point to another? The garden of a maniac who hates gardens? It’s hard to even express how awful it all is. The description, like the paths, folds in upon itself for no discernible fucking reason.
Do you understand how much this monument revolts me? Do you understand that this revulsion is not merely an expression of dislike for the President it honours and the politics it enshrines? This is a spiritual assault, via aesthetics, on the idea that we can share anything. It is hideous on purpose. And to deny its hideousness is to deny all Beauty too. To claim that THIS is uplifting, that THIS is worthy, that THIS is an artistic addition to the nation that graces a country and honours a legacy, is to utterly deny the foundations of aesthetics altogether.
You can’t find this beautiful unless you have lost the capacity to understand, recognise and know Beauty. Unless that has been excised from your being. Unless your soul has a gap. It’s in the gap without soul that this building lives.
It’s the ugliest fucking thing you could put in stone unless you depicted a man taking a shit being beheaded at the same time. There is no modern art installation quite so awful as this, although each and every aesthetic crime that came before, from the porcelain urinal moved into a gallery to the unmade contents of Tracy’s bed, through the turds in cans to the smug bland monotony of a Banksy satire, has led to this far more directly than any path surrounding it does.
Obama’s ego, it seems, is a perfect mirror of the idiot howl of insensate lunacy that is modern art, as well as modern politics.
When we are presented this thing, regardless of our politics, we should be human enough to know that it is ugly. But that’s partly the point. It’s a test of how far they control people, as well as a statement of continued power. We can force this hideous mess on America, even while Trump is President. He can’t put his name on an existing building or build a ballroom without vast opposition, but Obama can have this, a gigantic middle finger to the real America and to the aesthetic codes of western heritage, tradition and beauty.
