In the Daily Telegraph's list of "50 things you might not know about Barack Obama", we learn that the US president-elect is a keen collector of Spiderman and Conan the Barbarian comics, that his favourite food is shrimp linguine cooked by his wife, Michelle, that he is left-handed, that he likes Miles Davis and Picasso, and that he used to be called Barry. For BD readers, though, the most interesting revelation is that, if he hadn't taken up politics, Barack Obama would have liked to have been an architect. By chance, Danny Libeskind tells me that Obama attended one of his recent lectures. After the Dubya years, this genuine interest in architecture comes as a pleasant shock. Might Obama be tempted to push an intelligent architectural agenda? The design of monuments aside, few US presidents have taken a close interest in the subject, although one of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, was a fine and inventive Palladian.
展开▼
