Whatever happened to the presidential library?

Angelenos! Tickets for “A LACMA Therapy Session,” the first Punch List live event, are going fast—so fast that we may sell out soon. A collaboration with L.A. Material and Los Angeles Review of Architecture, and featuring Carolina A. Miranda, Frederick Fisher, Jimenez Lai, Antonia Cereijido, and Samuel Medina as well as new photographs of the David Geffen Galleries by Janna Ireland, it’ll take place on the afternoon of June 7 at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, with a drinks reception to follow. Reserve your spot here.

There are 13 presidential libraries scattered across the United States, from Simi Valley (Reagan) on the West Coast to Boston (JFK) on the East. Actually, “scattered” is maybe the wrong word, suggesting as it does light and airy buildings tossed across the landscape, in hopes of seeding brilliant new scholarship on the evolution of executive power. In the last half-century, the presidential library as a building type has grown bigger, more expansive in its public programming, less conducive to archival research, and more architecturally ambitious with each passing decade. There is nothing light or airy about most of these buildings, whose architects include Gordon Bunshaft (LBJ), James Polshek (Clinton), and Robert A.M. Stern (Bush the younger); instead they favor the solid (sometimes stolid) and the self-serious.'

The trend will soon reach its peak—or at least a notable plateau, since plans for a high-rise Trump Library in Miami, as Punch List readers know, are already circulating—with the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on June 19. When I wrote back in 2017 about the initial design for its campus of buildings in Jackson Park, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the adjectives I relied on included “somber,” “sober,” “monolithic,” “tight-lipped,” and—for good measure—“sepulchral.” Since then Chicagoans have taken to calling it the Obamalisk.

I’ll have more to say about the Obama Center next week; I’ll be touring it on Wednesday. For this dispatch I thought I’d go back to the beginning—not to George Washington, since presidential libraries as we now understand them didn’t exist in his day, but to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who basically invented the form.