Is it time to reinvent 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.

This trend will soon reach its peak—or at least a 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 used included “somber,” “sober,” “monolithic,” “tight-lipped,” and—for good measure—“sepulchral.” Since then Chicagoans have taken to calling its main tower 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.

And so on a perfectly beautiful morning earlier this week—yes, I have become the kind of person who marvels at the lushness of May green at the end of a long New England winter—I drove north from my house in New Haven to Hyde Park, New York. There I visited not just the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum but the adjacent family estate, Springwood, where Roosevelt grew up; a superbly designed visitor and education center, added in 2003, by Kliment Halsband Architects; and a nearby walled garden designed in 1911 by the great Beatrix Ferrand for her cousin, Thomas Newbold.

I also spent an hour or so walking along the Hyde Park Trail, which slips down the hill from the back of Springwood and approaches—but never actually reaches, at least in this section—the banks of the Hudson River. The overall effect was to suggest that the Library and Museum building is part of a larger, carefully considered ensemble—one that reflects not only each stage of Roosevelt’s life but also nearly every one of his diverse interests, from architecture to taxidermy.

It is in fact a third hobby, archivism, that explains how FDR created the presidential library as we have come to know it. Roosevelt was a fastidious collector (of coins, military documents, model ships, and books) and keeper of records: “the nation’s answer to the historian’s prayer,” as Robert D. W. Connor, the inaugural Archivist of the United States, put it in 1939. The historian Waldo Gifford Leland predicted that the happiest day of Roosevelt’s life “would be that on which he saw the Army trucks, loaded with his papers, leave the White House grounds bound for Hyde Park.”

As a result, Roosevelt looked with a mix of disdain and alarm at the way presidential records had long been treated. In those days, on leaving office, presidents “just took everything with them,” former FDR Library director Paul Sparrow told David Priess on the Lawfare podcast in 2024. “It was considered their personal property.”

(That means those infamous photos of boxes of records from Donald Trump’s first term stacked next to a toilet at Mar-a-Lao, or Joe Biden’s in a Delaware garage, are not exactly historically anomalous.)

Sparrow added: “Some presidents, like John Adams, were very careful, and they kept the records clearly. Some literally burned their records because they didn't want history to look at them. Some of them put them in warehouses, [where] they were eaten by rats or destroyed by floods. I mean, it was just a complete mess.…There was no system.”

Roosevelt’s response proceeded on two tracks, one political and the other architectural. He signed the National Archives Act into law on June 19, 1934, creating the independent federal agency that would ultimately take on the responsibility of preserving presidential records. And he began sketching out designs, later formalized by the architects Henry Toombs and Louis A. Simon, for a Dutch Colonial building in Hyde Park to hold a museum chronicling his presidency and a library holding his papers.

What was most striking for me, on my visit earlier this week, was the relative modesty of that building, which has fieldstone walls, wraps around a central entry court, and buries much of its bulk below ground. (Architecturally it has a strong resemblance to FDR’s nearby retreat, Top Cottage, another collaboration with Toombs.) After an extension completed in 1972, it covers roughly 110,000 square feet. (Stern’s George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas is more than twice as large; the Obama Center campus, with landscape architecture by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, covers 19 acres in all.) While hardly cutting-edge, the displays on FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt’s lives, which date back to a renovation by EYP Architecture & Engineering in 2013, have a certain charm.

Of course, the architectural modesty of the building is to a certain extent a distraction from the ambition of the vast apparatus that Roosevelt set up to support and sustain it and subsequent presidential libraries. Over time that system grew so large and bureaucratic that some presidents began to balk at its rules and requirements. Obama decided, like Nixon before him, to break from the traditional partnership with the National Archives. In Obama’s case it was in part because the federal government was asking his foundation to pay a fee equivalent to a reported 60 percent of the construction budget (three times higher than for earlier libraries!) for an endowment to cover maintenance and other operating costs.

As a result, the building opening next month on the south side of Chicago is called the Obama Presidential Center; it is not officially a presidential library at all. There is a library on the Center’s campus, but it is a branch of the Chicago Public Library, not a federal operation. The National Archives will instead keep Obama’s records and artifacts at a facility in College Park, Maryland.

Obama’s decision to build a presidential center that is not an archive does have the effect of eliminating a certain tension that had built up in earlier libraries, between a mission of open scholarship on the one hand and, on the other, a desire among those who pay for, design, and run the larger operation to celebrate that president and protect him from bad publicity.

Roger Rosenblatt, writing in the New Republic in 1997, noted that presidential libraries as a group “are not primarily collections of written works, but shrines to a particular president’s alleged greatness.” Richard J. Cox, a longtime critic of the system, argued that a typical presidential library “is more useful for tourism, the local economy, and unbridled hero worship than any useful role in keeping Presidents accountable to Congress and the American people.”

And, as noted above, the buildings (and more recently, the campuses) keep getting bigger and fancier. As early as 1980, the historian Louis Leonard Tucker was complaining about their ballooning size—and the fawning tone of their museum displays. “These massive structures, with their elaborate, dramatic, and sophisticated museum programs, make a profound symbolic statement about the individuals they memorialize,” he wrote. “Every administration assumes the dimensions of a ‘Heroic Age.’” Several historians, including Cox and Robert Caro, have compared presidential libraries to the pyramids of antiquity.

All of which leaves us in a curious position as the Obama Center prepares to open. The system FDR founded was based on the idea that presidential libraries would maintain a modest (even quasi-domestic) scale and hold a collection of papers open to scholars and overseen by the National Archives. The Obama Center campus does neither. In fact it rejects both goals outright.

Does that mean the system of presidential libraries should be rethought altogether, or reinvented from the ground up? Maybe. And, if the goal is to reassert the scholarly nature of the enterprise, to create a place where historians and other interested members of the public can access the full sweep of a given president’s record, one alternative model has already been proposed.

In order to “end the cult of personality that seems to be in place with the current Presidential Library system,” Cox has argued, “we need a single Presidential Archives, housed in a facility run by the National Archives…in or nearby Washington, D.C.” Rotating exhibitions could be held there, he added, “but its primary purpose will be archival.” The idea is reminiscent of a plan to establish a permanent site for the Olympics, or one each for the Summer and Winter Games, to avoid the overbuilding and lingering debt that plague many host cities.

But it may be tough to put the genie back into the bottle. To become president of the United States in recent decades has required candidates to become prodigious fundraisers and expert shapers of their own personal and political narratives—two qualities that come in very handy when the time comes to craft a post-presidency plan and an architectural vision to go with it. To hope that a figure like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump would give up the chance to fix his legacy in bricks and mortar—or New Hampshire granite, as is the case in Chicago—in favor of a setup that privileges traditional academic research seems tremendously naïve.

To an extent, though, the model may be in the process of reinventing itself already. If departing presidents follow Obama’s lead in cutting ties with the National Archives—and the preliminary design for the Trump “library” shows not a single book, let alone a federally operated archival operation—we may simply be on the way to a permanent two-track system. Presidential museums will use high-profile architecture to lionize their subjects while the archives reside elsewhere, under what is sure to be a less eye-catching roof (and increasingly, given the increasing primacy of digital communication in the presidency, in the cloud).

If Cox’s plan for a single Presidential Archives is to come to fruition, in other words, it’s more likely to be a utilitarian complement to the glitzy buildings departing presidents love to commission than a replacement for them.

News & Notes

“This is the Chipotle where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense.”

Meanwhile, “Tammany Hall is a Petco.”

Gay Talese’s famous Esquire write-around, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” made a brief appearance in the April 3 Punch List. Here’s his outline/storyboard for the essay, via Daniel Wortel-London and the New York Public Library.

Mayor Mamdani’s housing blueprint includes a plan to “reboot NYCHA’s role as a public developer.”

Semafor reports that rather than admit the obvious, which is that the infamous Line project will never happen, the Saudi government is instead saying it’s pushing back work on the project “until at least after 2030.”

Cities are covering their Flock cameras with trash bags.

Norman Foster appeared on the Odd Lots podcast.

Finally, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison have announced the recipients of the first round of their New Aesthetics grants, designed rather grandly to illuminate “the aesthetic of the twenty-first century.” I was of course fascinated to read Collison’s assertion that “architecture seems to be like the discipline most ripe for new ideas.” More on this, to be sure, in the weeks to come.

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