Olmsted vs. Obama: Inside the Pushback Against the Presidential Library

To reinforce that point, Friends of the Parks points to a document filed with Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development by the Washington, D.C.–based Cultural Landscape Foundation, arguing that the tower would cast shadows over the parkland, destroy the serenity and seclusion of Wooded Island, and “reorient the visual and spatial experience of the landscape to focus on a single architectural element, one whose stark facades, reminiscent of a Brutalist idiom, would strongly contrast with its natural setting.”