An architect with two decades of built work, several books, and dozens upon dozens of awards from the American Institute of Architects, the Architectural League, and the Graham Foundation can hardly be called a dark horse . Yet John Ronan , the single local architect out of the seven recently chosen to advance to the final round to design Barack Obama’s Presidential Center in Chicago , has been cast as one a few times.

“It’s easy to stay under the radar here,” Ronan says when I ask him whether the descriptor helps or hurts. “I think architects know my work, but maybe the general population less so.”

Hedrich Blessing

Ronan is now competing to build the project that will define President Obama’s built legacy, a $500 million complex that includes a museum, community gardens, labs, classrooms, and of course, a library, on Chicago’s South Side. The list of finalists for the project, announced in December, includes five firms with New York offices—David Adjaye, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Tod Williams Billie Tsien, SHoP Architects, and Snøhetta—as well as the Paris- and Geneva-based Renzo Piano.

Ronan is conspicuously the only architect working in the city where the project will be built, and his firm is on the smaller side of the list. Yet he has a reputation for being a thoughtful, research-focused architect, whose buildings are carefully tailored based on context and need.

Hedrich Blessing

Ronan, who graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1991, began amassing what’s now a long list of built work in the early 2000s, focusing particularly on schools and institutions. Much of it is not far from the two neighborhoods that have been chosen as potential sites for the Obama library, such the Gary Comer Youth Center. This welcoming cluster of community spaces is clad in gem-toned panels, topped by a glowing glass tower that looks almost like an exclamation point atop the rooftop garden, speckled with skylights.

In fact, the Obamas have already held two major events here. “I also remember back when this center was just an idea,” the First Lady said at a speech set there in 2012. “And it is really amazing to see this phenomenal facility. I remember when it was just being built, and I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to be here, seeing this thriving, inspiring, beautiful place just minutes from where I grew up.” The news conference to announce Chicago as the home of the future presidential library, in 2015, was also held within the building.

Hedrich Blessing

You can find Ronan’s work sprinkled across the city. There’s the Poetry Foundation, an elegant and understated downtown building edged by black louvres revealing hints of golden light from the interior. It’s a building full of “subtle, slowly unfolding pleasures,” as Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin succinctly put it when it opened in 2011. “Ronan’s refined design offers a civilized antidote to this crudeness,” Kamin added, referring to the thickets of condo towers that have sprung up in neighborhoods that border the downtown over the past decade.