S6E2: Billie Tsien

Billie Tsien is the co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, which built a new home for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia:

The studio is now working on the Obama Presidential Center on the south side of Chicago, which Tsien says will be very different from other presidential libraries:

I just read a memoir by Robert Caro about going into the LBJ Library. And he talks about being faced with these banker’s boxes, thousands and thousands and thousands of pages. But with Obama really being the first really digital president, a lot of his banker’s boxes don’t even exist because not everything was on paper.

There will be classrooms. There will be broadcast studios like the one we’re sitting in now. There’ll be an auditorium, a productive garden, a teaching kitchen. The whole idea is about teaching young people from the neighborhood, from the country, and from the world about civic engagement and how to help to change their world.

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