Concrete that Speaks at the Obama Presidential Center.

• A corner of the facade of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago spells out 103 words from Obama's "You Are America" speech in 458 individual concrete letters, each over 4 feet tall.
  
• The letters are cast from MAXtect™, Amrize's ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC).
  
• Fine Concrete, Amrize and TYLin developed a custom approach to make the letters behave as load-bearing structures while appearing to float.
  
• Opened in June 2026, the Obama Presidential Center represents the tallest and longest span of UHPC ever installed on a building in North America.

Why was Ultra-High-Performance Concrete (UHPC) the only material suitable for the Obama Presidential Center's facade?

UHPC is the only material strong and flexible enough to form solid, freestanding concrete letters at this scale while withstanding Chicago's notorious weather. Chicago isn’t called “The Windy City” for nothing. It can also be the cold city, the hot city, the rainy city and the snowy city — all conditions the concrete had to withstand. 

“UHPC was the only way we could have arrived at this solution in its current form," says Chris Bird, senior structural engineer at TYLin. “It has the benefits of stone in an exterior application. It's durable and meets the exposure criteria, but it also has the ductility and flexibility of steel. Neither of those materials alone would have been appropriate for this type of structure.” 

Fine Concrete and Amrize were ready for this moment. The two companies had collaborated on other projects using MAXtect for over a decade — including this specific mix: an ultra-high-performance cementitious matrix and high-strength fibers. "At the time, Fine Concrete was the only fabricator in North America that had used the stainless steel fiber mix," notes Michael Finnegan, Fine Concrete’s president. The partnership has also brought MAXtect to other complex architectural applications, including the Thompson Hotel in Miami.

According to Nicole Sherman, the other founding partner and managing director at the time, the Fine Concrete-Amrize relationship was closer to a field-testing partnership than a traditional supplier relationship. Uchenna Nwogu, Amrize’s director of operations for MAXtect, recalls how they refined MAXtect’s color consistency, fiber dispersion and workability through repeated trials. 

“Fine Concrete has a lab, so we’d send some of our technical team members down there to run extensive testing across multiple batches, and they opened up their space to us to conduct multiple repetitions of the mix, working closely together to make sure it was up to standard.”

Architectural UHPC has 10 times the compressive strength and over five times the tensile strength of traditional concrete. While the blend has been used internationally for decades, projects of this scale remain rare on this side of the Atlantic. U.S. standards are still being developed, which is why Michael says MAXtect’s track record carries real weight for architects and engineers considering it for the first time.

Amrize sees that history as the foundation of the relationship too. “We were one of the first suppliers of UHPC in the market, so our reputation has been built on a consistent, durable product. We’ve delivered multiple projects over the years that have demonstrated our reliability,” says Uchenna. “Fine Concrete has stayed with us through all that time, and we’ve continued to build and grow the relationship.” 

That track record is part of why Fine Concrete has treated Amrize as a partner of choice for its UHPC work. And this UHPC project represented a technical challenge like no other.

How did engineers make individual letters behave like load-bearing elements?

Engineers used custom computational modeling to create a design that treated each letter as a structural element, adjusting panel groupings, connection points and internal reinforcement.

Look closely at the words — as you can from inside the center — and you’ll see this is more than a collage of individual characters. 

Each letter had to carry a real structural load — the way a beam or a column would. Yet the letters aren’t consistently shaped. They have curves, varied spacing, and differing connection points. They also couldn’t be changed. The text, font, kerning, and scale were all fixed by the design. The only variables the engineers could adjust to make this work structurally were how the letters were grouped into panels, where the connections landed, and how reinforcement was arranged inside each piece.

With a cluster like “O-B-A” behaving differently under a load than “A-M-E,” manual calculation of the panels wasn’t realistic. Some spanned nearly 39 feet. There was no precedent in concrete.

TYLin developed custom computational tools to model how each letter would respond to structural forces, refining through reinforcement and geometry far faster than what could be done manually. They collaborated with two other engineering firms — C&E, performing a parallel analysis, and Maffeis, using a different software platform. “By comparing results at every stage, our three teams built confidence that the design would perform exactly as intended,” says Vassil Draganov, a principal at TYLin.

How do you make 14,000-pound, solid concrete panels seem weightless?

The resulting panels weighed up to 14,000 pounds. Yet, as Nicole explains, the design was intended to convey a weightless appearance. “The client really wanted the facade to look like it was floating off the building. They wanted as few connection points as possible, and those connections had to be invisible from the inside.” 

For the connections back to the base building, the team embedded stainless steel plates roughly 2.5 to 3 inches thick and 4 inches wide directly into the UHPC. Each panel transfers its full load through connection points small enough to disappear.

With each panel being unique, production required innovation. Fine Concrete designed, tested and fabricated a reusable letterpress system — a set of 52 letterforms that could be reassembled, letter by letter. Compared to the conventional approach of using disposable foam forms, this strategy saved materials and cut waste. With this letterpress kit of parts, Fine Concrete partnered with Envel, a fabricator/installer within 100 miles of the site, so the resulting pieces could be snapped into place like Scrabble tiles. 

But would the UHPC hold up in practice against the near-constant wind off Lake Michigan? Working with the building’s facade consultant and Notre Dame University’s civil engineering department, the team tested the panels at wind speeds 150% above the expected maximum. There was no observed cracking. 

Once at the site, each panel would travel 10 minutes to reach the building’s upper floors where the speech would be placed. Over several weeks, all 39 panels were installed. The execution had matched the ambition.

When the Obama Presidential Center opened on June 19th, 2026, it realized an unprecedented vision after ten years in the making. The 83-foot-high, 458-letter screen wall is the tallest and longest span of UHPC on a building in North America.  

It’s not just a building. It’s a message, cast letter by letter, built to remain legible for generations to come. For Michael, that permanence is the real story.

“This is something that’s going to last 100 years or more. That’s a pretty remarkable thing to be a part of, combining Amrize's MAXtect with the fabrication process Alexander and Nicole developed,” he says. “Not everything is meant to last that long. But if you're building something you want to stand for generations, we've got a pretty powerful story to tell about how we can make that happen.”