Power and pallor in presidential libraries and museums — Part IV

This is a continuation of a series of posts assessing the architecture of U.S. Presidents' libraries and museums. Part I covers those of John Adams to Rutherford Hayes; Part II, William McKinley to Herbert Hoover; Part III, Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy. This is Part IV.

Joyless Johnson
 

Too bad Kennedy's VP and successor didn't get an architectural/archival tribute as creatively cutting-edge as that of his prez. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft and R. Max Brooks of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, even lacks the high-tech innovation of Bunshaft's Lever House in New York (1952).

Photo by Beyond My Ken, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lever's marked contrast of vertical and horizontal elements (right) does resurface slightly in LBJ's libes (above), albeit haphazardly. Here it tries to be both at once, which cancels out both its latitudinal and longitudinal forces to render it static and nondescript, as if Bunshaft didn't know what to make of Johnson's presidency. And no wonder: Johnson's beneficent Medicare, Medicaid, Great Society and Civil Rights initiatives were badly balanced by his Vietnam War escalation, breaching his promise never to "send our boys to fight Asian wars" and disgracing him into declining a second term. Lever's well-balanced upward and outward thrusts articulate future technological and corporate growth and expansion with lofty optimism, while the library goes nowhere, leaden with the gloom that ended LBJ's irresolute presidency...

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

...as well as JFK's joyfully optimistic one, with the assassin's bullet that shot Johnson into power — and how. In On the Rise, Paul Goldberger wrote that the 1971 LBJ Library "suggested a pompous presidency; it may or may not have been so, but the mausoleum-like architecture makes it hard to believe that Mr. Johnson was anything but an emperor."

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives

The awkward placement of the horizontal element on top of the building does suggest an imperial crown — or the swelled head that made LBJ ruthlessly ambitious, rising from Senate Majority Leader to Vice President to President to Vietnam Warrior. This makes the building top- heavy, not lithely levitating like Lever House or the JFK Library. 

More like an airport control tower awaiting Lyndy's landing on Air Force One. The paved plaza certainly has a runway routineness, which is not helped by the bureaucratic impersonality of the University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs running beside it. 

Offsetting the austerity of the campus are colorful perennials, shady trees, lush greenspace, and especially the single-jet fountain, which hauntingly evokes the aura of the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame at JFK's Arlington National Cemetery gravesite when lit up at night.

Photo by Zereshk, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The library's Great Hall feels imperial indeed — soaring and reaching in all directions, coffered for an echoic effect, carved with a gargantuan presidential seal, and constructed with a ceremonial staircase rising regally toward a window-wall revealing the four-level presidential archive stacks. 

Trying to expand as much as possible within the confines of its concrete shell, the hall conveys Johnson's great power- grab and mountain-climb up the political ladder — as well as his ultimate demise. 

For its barren walls, empty coffers and underutilized space sour with the vapidity of vanity, the all-for-nothing aura of a president's fall from greatness, and his failure to carry Kennedy's vision to full fruition.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Nor are the archives particularly appealing. Resembling cell-block rows instead of library stacks, they contradict the space's openness with a jail's barred enclosure, making one wonder why they are displayed just so. To invite us to learn more about an underappreci- ated man? To suggest a punishment due him for overextension of power?

Photo by Wally Gobetz, courtesy of Flickr.com

LBJ's four-door Lincoln limousine does lend credence to Goldberger's speculation of a pompous presidency (though Johnson didn't order it until after leaving office). It also casts him as a "limousine liberal," a term coined soon after Lyndon left office in 1969 when Democratic New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino described his Republican opponent, John Lindsay, as such. (Lindsay won, then switched parties.)

Photo by Found5dollar, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Of course, no presidential museum is complete without a precise, down-to-the-details replica of the Oval Office as it looked when that museum's namesake occupied it – this one complete with his presidential desk, three-TV console enabling him to keep track of CBS, NBC and ABC broadcasts simultaneously, period phones and teletype machines, personal books and mementos, and a portrait of FDR that LBJ looked to for inspiration. At least this space's classical style and presidential-suite luxury are a temporary relief from the white-bread blandness of the building itself.

Photo by Ajay Suresh, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, as we leave the LBJ library and museum, we can't help noticing its plainness on the plain it stands on. Its uniform cream-travertine skin, relieved from total blah by cornices of modillions formed by the coffered ceiling structure, doesn't exactly make us want to go back there, and seems to memorialize Lyndon Johnson as an imperial but nondescript president who was too full of contradictions, missteps, and deviations from his Great Society idealism for us to get a proper historical reading on him – hence the lack of architectural reading we get on his library/museum.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!