By Michael Kimmelman | New York Times
You’d be hard-pressed not to like the new $450 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. It’s an easy charmer and a spectacular work of ecologically minded architecture in the drop-dead gorgeous North Dakota Badlands.
The firm Snohetta in New York designed it. The building is 93,000 square feet of mass-timber and rammed-earth — a huge Hobbit house hugging the precipice of a grassy butte overlooking the tiny town of Medora, N.D.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park is five minutes away.
Presidential libraries are all the rage, if you hadn’t noticed. The podcasters on Dezeen Weekly joked that they’re arriving like buses now: you wait for one and three of them come at the same time.
Barack Obama’s $850 million presidential center opened last month on the South Side of Chicago in a glowering granite tower housing a museum but with no actual library of presidential records. Obama’s records are stored with the National Archives in Maryland and his papers are in the process of being digitized.
President Trump has announced plans for a “library” that he imagines as a skyscraper in downtown Miami containing a Trump-themed museum and luxury hotel but no library, either.
Now along comes Roosevelt’s museum — backed by a private nonprofit unconnected to the National Archives and Records Administration. It’s a presidential library in name only, because Theodore Roosevelt’s physical papers were scattered before presidential libraries even existed. Franklin D. Roosevelt established the first one in the early 1940s, giving his archives to the nation as a gift and building a modest home for them on his estate in the Hudson Valley.
