Obama Presidential Center built for sustainability and climate resilience, and will help community too

The Obama Presidential Center has been built with sustainability literally in its foundation. But its infrastructure for clean energy, environmentalism and climate change resiliency will also help the communities around it on Chicago's South Side.

From landscape to architecture to what's served in its restaurant, sustainability efforts sprawl across the center's 19-acre campus. The grounds surrounding the Museum Tower and other campus buildings are lush, dense, and integrate the Jackson Park lagoon.

But there are also many green efforts that don't meet the eye

"Most of this, and I think the beauty of a lot of this green infrastructure is that you don't really realize it's there," said Matthew Bird of Michael Van Valekenburgh Associates, the landscape architecture firm that designed the grounds. "Because we're right here in historic Jackson Park, we wanted this campus to feel like it's always been here."

The landscaping is eye-catching and beautiful, but functional too. In an area called the Wetland Walk, Bird said a series of rain gardens allows the center to capture and control "basically enough water for a 100-year storm."

That's one example Bird gave of how his firm worked to combat the impacts of climate change with green infrastructure.

"Thinking about climate change was important for all sorts of aspects of the project, the sustainability efforts in the building, reducing our carbon footprint," Bird said.

Bird said thinking about and acknowledging the challenges of climate change and coming up with solutions was integral to their mission.

"I mean, the worst thing we can do is ignore it. We have to think about climate change in all aspects of what we're doing. We see it every day, like it's there's definite impacts to the weather that we're seeing," he said. "The way the plants are growing in the city is changing. We're using different species in this project that we know are more adaptable to climate change, and that was an important part of what we were thinking about in the landscape, because we know that basically the temperatures are changing in the area, and we need to make sure that this landscape is going to last as that temperature changes and climate is impacted throughout the years."

With the warming climate bringing more rain into the Chicago area, the water captured at the Obama Presidential Center will stay there instead of flooding surrounding neighborhoods, or it will be safely released back into the Jackson Park lagoon.

The underground system is also able to treat stormwater and reuse it to irrigate the campus. Ninety-eight percent of the rain that falls can be captured, ultimately saving more than 1 million gallons of water a year and reducing building water use by about 89%.

Bird collaborated with Nico Kienzl of Atelier 10, a team of environmental design consultants in New York City, to design that infrastructure.  Kienzl said the Obama Administration's own work to combat climate change was their North Star.

"It was very clear that this building needed to exemplify his, his attitude towards this topic," he said.

All the center's electricity needs are supplied by renewable energy.

"The building is an all-electric building, which is unique for building of that scale, so there's no fossil fuel," said Kienzl. "A lot of the work we do, in the end, isn't that visible to the public."

There is a lot happening underneath the center, literally.

"We've got geothermal systems that are below grade here that are basically acting as a way to control temperature in the building, so that's a big part of the reduction in the carbon footprint," Bird said.

The top of the Garden Pavilion is covered in solar panels, which are feet away from a food garden that is an ode to the White House kitchen garden Michelle Obama planted in 2009.

"It's something that the Obamas took from their time in the White House," said Bird.

The fruits and vegetables grown at the center will be featured in menu items sold in the on-campus restaurant.

Their hope, and the goal of the Obama Foundation, is to set a true example of sustainability through the efforts you can see, and the ones you can't.

"So it will inform its visitors, and it will hopefully inspire everybody, from the general public to other museums who want to do something, and maybe just haven't had the demonstration project, or the things that they can reference where they see this has been done," Kienzl said.

The Obama Presidential Center opens to the public on June 19.