Power and pallor in presidential libraries and museums — Part II

McKinley mediocrity, majesty
 

Photo by Bosley52, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The William McKinley Presidential Library and Museum (did you say "mausoleum"?) in Canton, Ohio, looks even deader, like a '60s college campus design dinosaur. But it makes up for its mediocrity with a presidential museum rarity — a science center with wildlife, fossils, electricity demos, a planetarium, a "Fascination Station" robot exhibit, and, yes, dinosaurs!
 

Photo by BFDhD, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Its cathedral window arcade may be giving a token reference to the Greco-Roman temple front of McKim, Mead & White's National McKinley Birthplace Memorial (1915-1917) in his home town of Niles, Ohio: “Seen from the approach on Main Street, the building will be dominated by its central feature, a colonnade or propylaea leading into a court of honor.
 

Photo by BFDhD, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

"It is this court, the atrium of the old Roman palaces where the statue of the household god stood, which is to be the climax of the entire structure.” (The New York Times, Jan. 17, 1915)  

J. Massey Rhind's McKinley likeness, erect at a stance almost as rigid as an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh statue, does exert godlike dominion over the Georgia marble court of honor, extolling the steadfastness with which McKinley declared victory in the Spanish-American War, acquired Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain as part of the peace settlement, annexed Hawaii, raised protective tariffs to promote American industry, and defended the gold standard in the face of William Jennings Bryan's "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold" speech advocating free silver coinage instead. 

One of many McKinley statues to crop up across the country after his assassination, it's a typical pedestalization of a fallen president as a monumental might-have- been, akin to the frenzy of John F. Kennedy memorial-building, bust-casting, half- dollar minting, and school and airport renaming that followed his fall. So this museum-library-statuary complex, classically handsome and awesome and eye-filling as it is, is a bit overdone.
 

But the McKinley National Memorial (1907) in his second home town of Canton, Ohio, is a more modest affair (making Grant's Tomb also look overdone). Designed by Harold Van Buren Magonigle, this mausoleum (a real one this time) for McKinley's body sits on a site he often visited, and for which he recommended a war memorial for Stark County soldiers and sailors. Commanding its hill with the strategic surety of a Civil War major (which McKinley had been) and the scientific certainty of a planetarium (maybe the McKinley Museum's one should be here!), it tempts us up the long, high stair and through the Roman-arched portal to share a personal moment with McKinley inside, in more of the intimacy of a yurt than the grandiosity of a court. 
 

Photo by Michael D. Harlan, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The McKinley statue on the stair is also more true-to-life than his Birthplace Memorial's stick figure. Sculpted by Charles Henry Niehaus, this likeness was modeled on a photo of McKinley snapped by White House photographer Frances B. Johnston at Buffalo's 1901 Pan-American Exposition shortly before he was shot there. Speaking of which...
 

...the mausoleum is also a memorial to the expo's Temple of Music, in which anarchist Leon Czolgosz gunned down the President on Sept. 6, 1901. The temple's crowned dome, arched door, square fronts and stone blocks are recalled in the Memorial in a more mournful, less majestic way.
 
From Thomas to Thomas
 

Photo by Quarterczar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The white classical columns, entablature and fretwork balconies, the black window shutters and the red brick walls that bestow scholarly distinction on the Pavilions of Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia (below) do the same honors for Thomas Woodrow Wilson's Birthplace and Presidential Library, a.k.a. The Manse (1846, left), in Staunton, Va.
 

Photo by Timothy Jarrett, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As a UVA alumnus, a Princeton University president, and the only U.S. President with a Ph.D., Woodrow Wilson deserves these academic architectural attributes, which also express the intellectual rigor he brought to postwar peace propositions: the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, his Fourteen Points, and the League of Nations that preceded the United Nations.
 
Calvin's castle
 

Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge certainly didn't get a quiet-looking haven for his Presidential Library and Museum. The Richardsonian Romanesque Forbes Library explodes gables, bays and turrets every which way, contrasts rocky granite with dark sandstone, and boasts bold Roman arches.
 

But the early 1890s public library is given a quiet location, a rural setting in Northampton, Mass., where Coolidge practiced law in his youth and retired after his presidency. Indeed, Coolidge's contrasting characteristics are shown here: the building's boldness expresses his outspokenness in his speeches as Northampton mayor, Massachusetts governor, vice president and president, while its setback site suggests his withdrawn state in private social settings.
 

The quiet atmosphere of a public library, too, befits Silent Cal's thoughtfully taciturn personality in private, while the building's grand arches, Guastavino tile vaulting and decorative accents allude to his flamboyance in the political arena, as well as his conservative, traditionalist values. 

HoJo Hoover
 
In contrast to the country-manor class accorded the Calvin Coolidge collection, his successor's Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa, was a rustic ramble of neocolonial nostalgia when dedicated in 1962 by Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover himself.
 

Intended to blend with the bucolic charm of the country cottage where Hoover was born in 1874 (left), the new complex ended up resembling a roadside restaurant like Friendly's or Howard Johnson's in its use of the rugged flatstone and fake colonial facings that were fad at the time.
 

Photo by Shadow2700, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, Ronald Reagan rededicated the building in 1992, following its $8 million facelift and expansion, with a new porch, multipaned windows and French doors typifying the tacky postmodernism of Reagan's era of excess.

Rustic Roosevelt

For details, see Part III of this post, soon to come...

Power and pallor in presidential libraries and museums — Part I

The just-opened George W. Bush Presidential Center I critiqued in my previous post invites comparison to the libraries and museums of Bush's predecessors — if only for its critical deficiency in creativity, composition, and credibility about its subject. 

Running the gamut from powerful to passable to poor, these shrines to sovereignty often do visually reflect their namesakes (or the images thereof) to the point where a president's flaws sometimes surface in the architecture. Which attests to the sorry state of affairs in presidential library-museum design, compared to its genesis:

Adams' athenaeum
 

Photo by John Phelan, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The academic distinction of the 1870 Stone Library at Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, Mass., resulted from the complete creative control the Adams family exerted over the building from the time John Quincy Adams called for its construction in stone in his 1847 will, to protect his books, manuscripts and maps from fire.

Photo by Charles E. Peterson for the Historic American Buildings Survey

His son, Charles Francis Adams, hired Edward Clarke Cabot to do the design honors, remembering the scholarly splendor Cabot had brought to the Boston Athenaeum library in 1847. Simpler in design, with the intimacy of a Gothic cottage rather than the grandeur of a classical temple of learning, the Stone Library visually emphasizes the voluminous book collection of John Adams, John Quincy Adams and their progeny as a stimulant to study with few stylistic diversions. It certainly worked for Charles, who edited 12 volumes of his father's memoirs, ten volumes of grandpa John's diary and the letters of grandma Abigail here. Their great-grandson Henry Adams wrote his nine-volume U.S. history here and recatalogued the books, and his brother Brooks Adams published six works he had worked on here.

The four solid walls of books reaching the roof — entailing running balconies for exploration of the upper echelons — clearly express the desire for undistracted study and higher learning John Quincy stated in a 1776 letter to his father at age 9:

Photo courtesy of the National Park Service

"My head is much too fickle. My thoughts are running after bird's eggs, play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me a studying. I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the third volume of Rollin's history, but designed to have got half through it by this time. I am determined this week to be more diligent." 
(Source: John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage)
 

Photo courtesy of Adams National Historical Park

The library is an integral part of Peacefield (1731- 1850s), the Old House where John and Abigail, John Quincy and Louisa, Charles Francis, Henry and Brooks Adams all lived. The Georgian wooden Old House and the Gothic Stone Library stand perpendicular in stark stylistic contrast, reflecting the changing tastes of the Adams generations.

Yet the are well unified by their sloping slate roofs and the 18th-century-style garden of annuals and perennials Abigail meticulously planned and her descendants fastidiously tended — which extends seamlessly to the ivy that almost obscures the library, alluding to the Ivy League (Harvard) all the Adams men joined. The buildings also work together as a living presidential library of books and papers on many scholastic subjects and museum of fine art and furniture that connect us directly with the Adams' political, social, intellectual and artistic aims, as John expressed to Abigail in a 1780 correspondence:

“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Artchitecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” (Source: National Park Service)

Too bad this first presidential library and museum failed to set a good example for subsequent ones, which became more and more like mass-appeal expo centers and cultist circuses as time, taste and history evolved.

Lincoln Lite
 

Photo by Rogerd, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For instance, the 2005 Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., designed by HOK (the largest U.S.-based architecture-engineering firm), comes across as a corporate convention center or suburban shopping mall on first glance, despite its token integration of the Lincoln Memorial's colonnade and the White House's peristyle bowfront into its street front.

Photo by George G. Milford, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The White House front (minus the Truman balcony, for historical correctness) is even replicated in full form in the Museum Entry Plaza, making the outside pavilion a lead-in to the main attraction, assuring us we'll get our history and not be as bored as the building looks. Yet this faux façade's plaster- cast pomp emits a Disneyland effect, like the Oval Office repros found in most every presidential museum.

Photo by Winonave, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As does the tableau of the Ford's Theater Presidential Box. Wax-museum mannequins of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, innocently absorbed in Our American Cousin, and John Wilkes Booth, surreptitiously sneaking into the box from the back, attempt to capture the moment before Booth's bullet blew Abe's brains out April 14, 1865.

This is one of many features in what the museum website calls "the first Experience Museum of its kind." Archival research and architectural archaeology, aided by leading Lincoln scholars, wrought detailed stage-sets and multimedia extravaganzas from the latest in theme-park technology, high-tech video, surround sound and special-effects synergy. From Lincoln's log cabin to Mary's fashion-show ballroom to a whispering gallery of Lincoln cartoon contempt to the Emancipation Proclamation Illusion Corridor, the museum aims for the ultimate "Lincoln experience." This was praised by John R. Decker in the Journal of American History for how it "intelligently and compellingly uses visual culture to meet its mission as a public pedagogical institution" but panned by Southern Illinois University historian John Y. Simon for trivializing its topic as a "Lincolnland."

Photo by Bill Pollard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A more authentic Lincolnland can be experienced in the museum's Visitor Center, a renovation of the 1898 Springfield Union Station, which stands as a testament to the Transcontinental Railroad Lincoln spearheaded but did not live to see to its terminal. The reconstructed 110-foot castlelike clock tower recalls Lincoln's towering presence.

Photo by Bill Pollard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Inside, you really feel the President's presence in the soaring ceiling, suggesting his 6-foot-4 height; the cornice-topped doorways, recalling the stovepipe top-hat that made him taller still; and the space's courtlike but congenial calm, conveying his stately, courtly demeanor. It doesn't need a lot to say a lot about Lincoln.

Grant's tomb
 

Photo courtesy of The Reflector at Mississippi State University

Unlike the overstatement with which the Lincoln library-museum presents a man of understated manner, the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library is understated in its memento of a man who was much more over-the-top, both as Lincoln's Commanding General of the Army and as President. Buried deep in the lower level of Mississippi State University's Mitchell Memorial Library, the Grant Library is modest in its introduction: a simple space of lithographs, photographs and other Grant collectibles precedes the collection's "15,000 linear feet of correspondence, research notes, artifacts, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia" and "4,000 published monographs on various aspects of Grant's life and times" — edited as The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant by none other than "Lincolnland" critic John Y. Simon, who clearly knew something about moderation in presidential presentation. Also, Lincoln biographer Benjamin P. Thomas described Grant as a "quiet, retiring man," a quality encapsulated in this space's somber, studious atmosphere.

Photo by J. Miers, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

But if Grant's grandiosity is what you want, it's what you'll get in the real Grant's Tomb (1897) in New York City. Designed by John H. Duncan, this monumental mausoleum's Capitol Dome-esque rotunda, Lincoln Memorialish temple front and dive-bombing eagle duo grandiloquently introduce a sublime stairhall to a coffered dome illuminated by an in-the-round Ionic colonnade, embellished with eagle-wings and other ornamental opulence, and cloverleafed with coffered arches. This forms a celestial canopy for the polished black sarcophagi of General and Julia Grant, with bronze busts of Union Army Generals McPherson, Ord, Sheridan, Sherman and Thomas looking down on their leader and his lady. 

How's that for a Greco-Roman tribute to King Ulysses?
 
Hayes' hideaway
 

Photo by Pepsi2786, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Built in 1916 in Fremont, Ohio, as America's first formal presidential library, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center got that tradition off to a poor start by being more mausoleum- like than the one for Hayes' predecessor above. Yes, this window- less non-building could be a fitting tribute to a non-President (his foe, Samuel Tilden, won the popular vote).

Photo by Shadow2700, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

But its faceless front is no friendly intro to Hayes' exquisite summer retreat, Spiegel Grove (1860- 1889), a Victorian brick mansion with gabled roof and Italianate wraparound porch, exhibiting books, artworks and other Hayes heirlooms. Here, Rutherford and Lucy Hayes enjoy a privilege the Grants were denied: burial in their own grove, along with Hayes' warhorse "Old Whitey."
 
McKinley mediocrity, majesty
 
For details, see Part II of this post (link here)...

Bush's bunkhouse

When preliminary renderings of the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas were first released, I posted one on the Boston Society of Architects' LinkedIn profile page for discussion. One architect said it resembled "a very badly designed mausoleum." 

I couldn't agree more, now that this architectural aggrandizement of Dubya's dominion — encompassing a library, museum, policy institute and repository for more than 70 million pages of papers, 200 million e-mails, 4 million digital images and 43,000 artifacts — was dedicated on April 25 amid fanatical fanfare and rah-rah reexamination of a loathed-in-his-lifetime president.

Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries

"The Bush Center's brick-and-limestone design complements the American Georgian character of the SMU campus," claims bushcenter.org. Superficially, though. Absent are the scholarly symmetry, delicate detail and monumental majesty of SMU's Jeffersonesque Dallas Hall (1915)...

Photo courtesy of the Arizona Daily Star

...in favor of boxy banality, confused composition, and cold comfort on the campus. How pathetic that master architect and architectural historian Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, could cook up something this dead, dreary and dungeonlike.

More than a mausoleum, it has the aura of an urn burial for the casualties of Bush's War on Terror, a detention facility for Guantanamo Bay's torture victims (which Bush denied), or a courthouse where an impeachment trial should have been held for Bush's war crimes — especially the "weapons of mass destruction" lie that triggered his Iraq War (not mentioned at the dedication).

The grounds do reek of a war zone. Their dense groundcover, rugged terrain, broken stones and sparse trees don't lay out an inviting green carpet to the Center. This isolates it on its hill, as if it's entombing unknown soldiers or ignored innocents who died in W's double-whammy war in Afghanistan and Iraq.


How sad (and ironic) that distinguished landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh took on this task, and that he hails from Cambridge, Massachusetts — a major liberal nemesis of Bush's stolen "election" in 2000 and razor-thin return to power in 2004, and a spawner of both of his campaign rivals, Al Gore (Harvard Class of '69) and former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. 

Yet a Cantabrigian's blessing of Bush Country could symbolize the setting aside of differences presidential library dedications tend to force in old Oval Office adversaries, as shown by the praise Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (not to mention George the Elder) heaped on Bush at the ceremony after chastising him in other necks of the woods.
 

Photo by J.P. Fagerback, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The building also typifies Stern's mix-and-match approach to architecture: edifices that appear patched and pieced together from kits of parts taken from postmodern pattern books. This gives the Bush Center awkward massing, a nondescript identity, an unfriendly face and an austere enticement to enter. ("Stern" is right!)

What a shame, since Stern showed his stuff with historical style in his Spangler Center (2001) at Harvard Business School in Allston, Mass. He designed this dining, study and lecture hall in perfect compatibility with HBS's 1920s Georgian Revival campus to look like it had been part of it from the start. 

 "The Spangler Center was conceived to give a new heart to the Business School, which had been atomized over time by many buildings and an increasing number of students living off campus," Stern himself said in the HBS Alumni Bulletin. "From the day it opened, students adopted Spangler as their own.” Stern did just the opposite with the distant, heartless Bush Center.

It does bear a slight resemblance to Building One of the Food and Drug Administration's White Oak Campus in Silver Springs, Md., built c.1950 as the Naval Ordnance Laboratory.

The Bush Institute entrance picks up the spirit of Building One's four-column cast-stone temple front (in Texas limestone), three-bay projecting wings, tripartite composition, brick façade and green-centered circular drive. 

But Building One's balanced symmetry isn't there. The placement of the library and Institute parts at a 9oº angle to each other knocks each of their façades lopsided in a push-and-pull polarity between the building functions — alluding to the ongoing clash of the two wars Bush left unresolved.

This recalls the Pushmi-Pullyu of Doctor Dolittle fame, as described by Hugh Lofting: "...no matter which way you came towards him, he was always facing you. And besides, only one half of him slept at a time. The other head was always awake and watching. This was why they were never caught and never seen in Zoos." A fitting description of Janus-faced George W. (doesn't the monkey in the picture look kind of like him?), asleep to negative popular opinion about his wars and their mass murder of civilians, yet awake to his war-aims with red-eyed resolve, deceitful denial and pigheaded pride ... and never impeached, removed from office or sent to jail, due in large part to Washington's persistent gridlock over the war, which the irresolute interlock of the Bush Center's two faces suggests as well.

Photo courtesy of the Arizona Daily Star

The flat-top lantern crown gives the façades superficial symmetry and synthesis but denies the building a distinctive signature (like the veto pens of Papa and Junior Bush). Thus the library's Frankenstein front feels dungeonlike. Black iron grills and window grids reminiscent of prison bars and portcullises starkly contrast the light limestone and lantern.
 

Photo courtesy of the Arizona Daily Star

The crown is a skylight lantern for the 67-foot- high Freedom Hall, an atrial manifestation of the determination "to expand the reach of freedom" Bush boasted about at the ceremony. The cage-like French windows don't exactly express "freedom" despite their view of the south skyline of Dallas (JFK's assassination site, don't forget).

The 360-degree LED high-definition video panorama of constantly changing images of Americana compensates for the hall's cold, cubical rigidity at the aesthetic level of a kiddies' planetarium show. The lantern itself, despite its fine pecan paneling and beacon-like night lighting, is no match for...

...the lantern of H.H. Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston (1877), where fine art frescoes, clerestory windows, gilding and paneling unite in a "Light of God" soar of space as a spiritual uplift to higher ideals. Light and shadow, solid and void, wall and window work together, unlike Freedom Hall's jarring contrasts of dark and light and use of artifice in place of art.
 

Photo courtesy of the Arizona Daily Star

Speaking of skylights, this lit-from-above steel "sculpture" of remnants of the wreckage from the World Trade Center's Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is a moving moment in the museum. Their mangled, bent state convey the chaotic horror of the mass destruction. As twin steel supports appearing to embrace, they allude to both the Twin Towers' collapse and the human need to reach out to each other for support in such tempestuous times. Their near- rectitude denotes the need to stand tall, firm and united in the wake of a threat to one's liberty and integrity, as Bush's demeanor aptly conveyed despite his reckless reaction.
 

But much of the museum is self-congratulatory hyperbole calculated to vindicate Bush for his crimes, denials, lies and leaving it up to his successor to mop up the mess he left behind: ongoing Middle East turmoil, the largest national debt in American history, the worst recession since the Great Depression.
 

Photo courtesy of the Arizona Daily Star

This lionization of a liar is in lockstep with today's reduction of political discourse to simplistic clichés and catchphraseology: "A Charge to Keep," "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," "No Child Left Behind" (here framed with the hackneyed Little Red Schoolhouse to mask the dubiousness of that program's effectiveness).
 

Speaking of fakery, the Bush Center boasts a full-scale replica of the Oval Office in the White House (with a "Resolute Desk" visitors can sit at to act out Bush's "resolve"). However, this is a standard fixture in most presidential museums, to give guests the next best thing to prattling with the President in person. (And, unfortunately, this tacky traditionalism can mar the modernism of a masterwork like the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with a dose of Disneyland.)
 

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."

— George W. Bush

These wings take you into a dreamworld of deception where you forget the carnage and corruption of the Bush administration and focus on the fantasies of family and freedom that rang in his rhetoric. His stalwart stubbornness, die-hard defensiveness, and impersonal indifference to innocent death and detention are articulated in the rigid, cold, stark, drab design of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. 

(Other examples of presidential library and museum design will be discussed in my next post, "Power and pallor in presidential libraries," so stay tuned.)

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!