President Obama spoke in Salem, Oregon on March 21,2008 and mentioned his dream to become an architect at an early age. An audience member shouts that President Obama would have been, "An architect of change!".

In the video below, on June 2, 2011 during The Pritzker Architecture Prize he tells the audience that his dream was to be an architect. He says that architecture is all about "creating buildings and spaces which inspires us, that help us do our jobs, that bring us together, and that become at their best, works of art that we can move through and live in...that's why architecture can be considered the most democratic of art forms."