Bush Presidential Library (SMU, Dallas TX campus) -- Architecture Review - LA Times

LA TIMES -- Saturday April 20, 2013

Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-bush-presidential-library-review-dallas-20130420,0,6482526.story

. . .architect Robert A.M. Stern's design for the George W. Bush presidential library, set to open to the public May 1, 2013 on the campus of Southern Methodist University.
The $250-million complex holds the president's archive as well as a museum, policy institute and foundation. Officially known as the George W. Bush Presidential Center, it is carefully and cannily contextual, like much of Stern's work.
Its wide and low-slung form, sunk into a modest hill and ranging from one to three stories high, is wrapped in red brick and cream-colored limestone in an effort to match the Collegiate Georgian buildings on the rest of the SMU campus. Covering 226,000 square feet, the center is set on a 23-acre piece of land about five miles north of downtown Dallas.
Anyone who has read Bush's 2010 memoir, Decision Points, will see in Stern's design all sorts of echoes of the 43rd president's approach. The architecture of the complex, like the rhetorical approach of that book, is stripped down and unadorned.
The building, like the Bush presidency, is about firmness, being resolute, even at the expense of nuance. Perhaps the emblematic line of that presidency, after all, came in early 2002, not long after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when Bush said, "You're either with us or against us; you're either evil or you're good."
"America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause," Bush said in his second inaugural address. "My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve and have found it firm."
The resolve of Stern's architecture here is also unyielding, and perhaps too much so — especially in the entrance plaza, with its three-sided colonnade of squared-off pillars.
This outdoor room has unavoidable and frankly unnerving connections to the architecture of muscular state power. It has echoes, fairly faint but altogether present, of authoritarian landmarks, particularly the 1959 National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the buildings Adalberto Libera and other architects designed for Benito Mussolini in Rome.
The museum, holding exhibits on the Bush presidency designed by Virginia-based TRD Group, covers 43,000 square feet. It includes a full-scale replica of the Oval Office that opens onto a careful re-creation of the Rose Garden. But there are some concessions to geography: the trees are crepe myrtles instead of crab-apples.
On its upper level, the complex holds an apartment available for use by the Bush family.
The building empties on the back into a 14-acre garden and public park by the landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, which slopes down toward a noisy stretch of freeway. Seen from the garden, the complex, three stories high on this elevation, is a good deal bulkier and less coherently organized than it looks as you face the main entrance.
The western façade, facing the campus and holding the entrance to the Bush Institute, is marked by a squared-off, double-height limestone portico. It overlooks, among other buildings, the 2001 Meadows Museum by the Chicago firm Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge, another exercise in throwback contextualism but one that is a good deal frillier than Stern's design.