Bush isn’t going to declassify anything of interest, like ever, so no one is going to visit his stupid presidential library at Southern Methodist University. I think the entire student body and faculty is humiliated that the library is even going to be associated with their school. And the architects are hilarious.
Besides fashioning a narrative that meets Mr. Bush’s approval, PRD has to package it in an innovative and appealing way for the tens of thousands of expected visitors.
The Virginia-based firm has not worked on other presidential libraries, and its role in the Bush project had not been disclosed until inquiries by The Dallas Morning News. But it has been involved since last summer, brandishing local ties rooted in the creation of the Texas State History Museum in Austin – which Mr. Bush dedicated in 2001 in the name of his political mentor, the late Bob Bullock, former lieutenant governor.
Mr. Murphy, who founded PRD, said his task is to do more than just recount events.
“We’re not really just trying to put a front cover and back cover around eight years of a presidency,” he said. “We have a much bigger story about America and about the history of the presidency and about the American experience. … We’ve got a great, great, great story.”
Mr. Murphy said he isn’t ready to say what he might use in the museum to highlight the Republican president’s life, works and policies.
And the main architect, Robert A.M. Stern of New York, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, said his plans are only in the initial stages, with at least two buildings – one for the library and museum and the other for a policy institute – slated at SMU Boulevard and Central Expressway.
Many presidential libraries “are big and bombastic. Quite a few have been dull. With Bush, there will be no bombast or boredom,” Mr. Stern said in an interview with Architect magazine.
I remind Bob Stern…no one is going to visit this stupid library or care one bit about the lack of bombast. It’s funny to even consider a ‘library’ dedicated to someone as moronic as George W. Bush.
