Architecture firms Snøhetta, Studio Gang and Henning Larsen have unveiled proposals competing for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, with designs that draw on the surrounding, rugged Badlands.
US firm Studio Gang, Copenhagen firm Henning Larsen and Snøhetta, which has offices in New York and Oslo, are competing to complete the library for Roosevelt, who served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is intended for a plot in North Dakota city Medora, which is in the Badlands National Park and abuts Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Each design proposal aims to draw on the rough terrain of the Badlands and the conservation policies Roosevelt worked on while president. Henning Larsen's proposal (top and above) is fragmented into four angular volumes topped with green roofs
"There is a unique and awe-inspiring beauty to everything about the Badlands that you simply cannot experience anywhere else," said Henning Larsen's design lead, Michael Sørensen. "The landscape only fully unfolds once you are already within it; once you are, the hills, buttes, fields, and streams stretch as far as you can see."
Henning Larsen and its project partner, the landscape architects Nelson Byrd Woltz, have developed a scheme composed of four angular grey volumes that are spliced with glass and topped with grass.
Inside, the volumes would be linked underground. Exhibition ...