As Alissa helpfully pointed out yesterday, our dear president-elect (we like to call him ‘Bam around the New York office) wanted to be an architect. A little nimble Googling on our part turned up the speech where he says as much. What’s even better, though, is that he hasn’t forgotten those early dreams.

I said as much in an article earlier this year, that looked at the architecture and planning policies of the three remaining candidates at the time–Clinton, McCain, and Obama. To wit:

If there were one, Barack Obama could be called the candidate of infrastructure; at least in much the same way he is called the candidate of hope, given his frequent invocation of infrastructure issues on the stump, much of which was tied to Katrina and directed toward his African-American base but has shifted in recent months to a wider focus on the economy and job creation.

To that end, Obama has proposed an Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which he unveiled in February. The bank would start with $60 billion from federal coffers—skimmed off shrunken Iraq expenditures—that would be leveraged through public-private partnerships to create $500 billion in infrastructural investment.

That money would go to strengthening the “core” infrastructure of roads, airports, dams, and the like; high-speed rail; traffic mitigation and transit-oriented development; clean, domestic energy production and research; and rebuilding and improving the Gulf Coast and river-borne transportation

And you may recall, we’ve also pegged him as pro-transit. Planetizen has a thoughtful look at his planning policies, as well. Heck, even Fox News calls him the first green president. He’s not the only one, either. Recent Democratic hopefuls Clinton and Gore got in on the act, too, she stumping for the USGBC‘s green school initiative and he writing two major op–eds on “green capitalism.” Maybe Ralph Nader wasn’t the end of the Green Party after all.