Snøhetta Lays a Grass-Covered Roof over the Badlands for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

Presidential libraries usually work as monuments. They sit on prominent ground, announce a legacy, and ask to be looked at. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, takes a different position. Snøhetta, which won the commission in a competition against Studio Gang and Henning Larsen, has placed a 95,000 sq ft building on the northeast edge of a butte. It sits on a 93-acre site of Forest Service land just west of town, near the entrance to the south unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. JLG Architects served as architect of record. The library opens on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the United States. For a building tied to that date, the design is notably reluctant to stand out.

The key move is a single sloping green roof laid over two interior volumes, with a breezeway running between them. Craig Dykers has compared it to a leaf dropped onto the land. The roof is planted and shaped to follow the Badlands terrain, so from a distance the building reads more like a ridge than an object. Under the roof, rammed earth walls and mass timber carry the rest of the argument. For a president best known for conservation, Snøhetta chose to make the building about the ground rather than the man. We think that is the right call, and it is also a risky one.

A Roof That Behaves Like a Hill

From the prairie, you mostly see a long, low curve. The pale roof edge is the only firm line against the grass and the sky, and in the dusk and storm views it nearly disappears into the ridge. This is a large building, roughly the size of a regional museum, and it has almost no vertical presence. That restraint takes discipline. A presidential library has every reason to want a tower, a portico or an axis, and this one has none of them.

Dykers says the building should feel as if it came from somewhere else but has always been there. That tension shows in the images. The roof's planting ties it to the land, but the clean edge and smooth curvature are plainly man-made. The building is not trying to disguise itself. It is a deliberate geometric form, placed carefully, much as a fence line or a road becomes part of a landscape without pretending to be geology.

The Path Out to the Trail

A curved timber boardwalk links the building to the Maah Daah Hey Trail and to additional pavilions on the site. The runner in one image matters. The project expects visitors who arrive on foot, by bike, or straight off a trail, as well as tour buses. A tall wooden wall runs along one side of the boardwalk and channels the view. Angular benches placed along the curve make the walk a place to stop, not just a route to the entrance.

The stacked weathering steel volume set into the grasses picks up the layered look of the buttes in a harder material. It is the most literal geological reference on the site, and it works because it stays low and lets the grasses grow up around it. The palette across the grounds stays narrow: timber, rusted steel, prairie. None of it competes with the hills.

Living Under the Eave

The roof edge is where the building turns from landscape into architecture. Underneath, a timber soffit tracks the curve, and slender wood columns hold up the overhang. Vertical slats wrap the facade, and glazing sits behind them. The deep eave makes a shaded band between inside and outside. On an exposed Badlands butte, with intense summer sun and hard winds, that band is a practical response to climate as much as a design gesture.

The covered deck shows the structure most clearly. Exposed glulam beams and a single column frame the eroded terrain under storm clouds. Here the building acts as a viewing instrument. Snøhetta does not try to explain the landscape at this point. It frames a view and lets the hills do the work. Of all the spaces shown, this deck best captures what the project is trying to do.

Earth Walls, Timber Overhead

Inside, curved rammed earth walls give the building its weight. The visible layering in the compacted earth echoes the striated buttes outside, and sunlight raking across the surface brings out the texture. Glulam beams and slatted ceiling panels run overhead. Each material does a clear job: the earth encloses the space, and the timber covers it. Rammed earth also has a sustainability argument. It is a low-carbon material, and its thermal mass helps the high-performance envelope keep interiors stable without relying heavily on mechanical systems.

Skylights bring daylight deep into the plan. In some rooms the effect is dramatic, with a single shaft of sun crossing a slatted wood wall below a white faceted ceiling. The rough-edged timber benches look almost unfinished, and they fit the material honesty of the place. Our one question is how these spaces will handle the exhibits and visitor numbers a presidential library has to accommodate. Spaces this calm can lose that quality quickly once displays and crowds arrive.

Why This Project Matters

The building is expected to meet or exceed the Living Building Challenge criteria for energy and low-carbon materials. On-site solar panels sit on a parking lot shared with the Medora Musical, and off-site renewables supply the rest. Sharing the solar array is a modest but clever decision, because it puts the energy infrastructure on land that is already paved instead of on the butte. Put the energy target together with the earth walls, timber structure and green roof, and the library becomes a federal-scale test of whether a national civic building can be both regenerative and dignified.

The larger lesson concerns how a building represents a legacy. Snøhetta has turned the usual presidential library around. Here the landscape Roosevelt helped protect is the main exhibit, and the building is designed to recede into it. If this approach holds up under daily use, it offers a model for commemorative architecture that relies less on monumentality and more on paying attention to the site. That model would apply well beyond the Badlands.

Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library by Snøhetta, with JLG Architects as architect of record. Medora, North Dakota, United States. 95,000 sq ft. Completed 2026. Photography by Nic Lehoux.

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