A Spectacular Theodore Roosevelt Library Deep in the Badlands
New York Times · LC · trust 38/100
An inventive $450 million center devoted to Roosevelt, who died in 1919, blends in with the natural beauty of North Dakota and celebrates conservation.
An inventive $450 million center devoted to Roosevelt, who died in 1919, blends in with the natural beauty of North Dakota and celebrates conservation.
To report on the Roosevelt library, Michael Kimmelman drove to Billings County, N.D., which is nearly four times the size of New York City and has a population of 1,071.
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.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library slides into a butte in the Badlands so discreetly that it can be hard to make out against the hills and hoodoos. The library building, under a swooning walkable roof, links up with a boardwalk that loops around the butte and has places to sit and contemplate the views. 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.
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