The other major revision to the tower, in response to complaints that it was too opaque, has been to make it more transparent, not an easy trick with a structure sheathed in stone. To achieve this goal, the architects have enlarged and added windows, including a 100-foot-tall stretch of glass on the north elevation. They’ve also recast large sections of the southeast and southwest corners as filigree screens of stone letters. It’s not yet clear whether these will be abstractions or quotes from Barack Obama, but the renderings suggest they could transform what had been a brooding monolith into something more sculptural and luminous.

In addition to these design changes, community activists have scored other victories. The Obama Foundation recently awarded a $300 million contract to the Lakeside Alliance, a collective of five local construction companies, most of them owned by African-Americans. And a much-derided above ground parking facility on the Midway, an adjacent public park, has been scrapped in favor of an underground garage within OPC’s site.

Obama’s professed hope that OPC will be “an economic engine for the South Side” has come under fire from a surprising quarter: the University of Chicago, where he once taught. An open letter signed by over 100 professors and other faculty asserts OPC “will not provide the promised development or economic benefits.” The letter faults the Jackson Park site, both for privatizing public space and for lacking adjacent open space for additional new development. “It looks to many neighbors that the only new jobs created will be as staff to the Obama Center.”

The carefully scripted rollout of the revised design includes a video in which the former President, after admitting he once wanted to be an architect, explains the symbolism of the museum tower’s canted form. Showing an image of four slightly cupped hands, two black and two white, with fingers pointing up and almost touching, he says, “We designed it with this photo in mind—many hands, each one different, coming together as one. So too will each facade of our four-sided tower be a little different from the next. It’s our way of showing that it takes many hands to shape a place.” Obama’s rhetoric, as always, is stirring, but whether it will succeed in winning over this project’s numerous critics remains to be seen.