Snøhetta's Roosevelt Library Melts Into the Badlands

Out in the North Dakota Badlands, on a butte above the national park that shares his name, there’s a new building for Theodore Roosevelt. It looks like it grew out of the ground instead of landing on it. Snøhetta designed it, and if you know the Norwegian studio’s work, that will make sense.

Making big buildings feel like part of the land is the thing they do best.

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is 95,000 square feet, and the first thing it does is hide. One big green roof rolls over the whole building like a low hill, then dips back down to meet the prairie, following the ravines and gullies that erosion cut long ago.

From a distance, you might take it for one more rise in the land.

A Leaf Over Two Pebbles

Under that roof are two separate buildings with an open-air breezeway between them. Dykers calls it a leaf laid over two pebbles. The smaller pebble holds a theatre and classrooms.

The bigger one holds the galleries and a cafe. The breezeway between them frames a clean view of the land, and it’s one of many spots where the building just stops and points you at the scenery.

They pushed the whole thing to the back of the site, near a steep drop-off, so the land would be the main event. You catch it through the breezeway, from the roof you can walk on, and through windows set right where a good view is.

That was the hard part. “It’s easier to make small things feel larger,” founding partner Craig Dykers told Dezeen. “It’s harder to make large things feel small.” Or, as he put it: “The library is the landscape, and the landscape is the library.”

Built the Way a Local Would

The materials are where it makes its case. The breezeway walls are rammed earth, packed from soil dug up right on site, and their bands echo the stripes in the surrounding rock. The underside of the roof is wood. Inside, the mass-timber frame is left bare, except in the galleries, where the walls are smoothed over for hanging art.

None of it is for show. Using their computer models, Snøhetta borrowed from the old ways of building here, both the local Indigenous peoples and the settlers who came later. “The earth and soil on the roof is like a sod house that’s recognisable by everybody,” Dykers said. “We designed it the same way a person who’s lived here for generations would.” So it feels familiar and brand new at the same time.

The Roof Is the Point

The green roof isn’t a nice touch, it’s the whole idea, and you can walk on it. Wooden walkways branch out from the building, over the top and out across the grass, so you can see the land up close. Skylights poke through, marked by small mounds of weathered Corten steel, and light drops through them into the galleries below.

The plants came from Snøhetta’s Native Plant Project, all gathered locally. Landscape partner Michelle Delk said it “allowed us to preserve and protect much of the grasslands and work ultimately towards restoration.” The rest of the green list is long: low-carbon concrete, mass timber, solar and geothermal power, and recycled wastewater. For a building this big, out in the open like this, that’s saying something.

Delk points to a quieter detail too. The doors don’t line up with the paths from the parking lot, so you have to slow down and wander a bit to reach them. “We tried to capture a slowing down,” she said, “inviting people to really read this landscape.” You end up approaching the building the way you’d approach the Badlands, on foot, in no hurry.

A Complicated Man, Handled Honestly

Unlike the new Obama Presidential Center, this isn’t an official government library. Private donors paid for it. That let it skip most of the usual monument stuff, and lean into the part of Roosevelt that’s least in dispute: he helped start the American conservation movement, which suits a building that tries so hard to leave the land alone.

Snøhetta also worked with Roosevelt’s descendants, and chose not to make him a hero in marble. Dykers was blunt that Roosevelt “had a very challenging history regarding racism and in terms of Indigenous and tribal peoples,” and said the library is “trying not to lionize him,” showing his flaws next to what he got right. You don’t often see a presidential library leave room for doubt.

Roosevelt first came to Medora as a young man in mourning, years before the presidency, and something about this hard, beautiful country stuck with him. More than a century later, there’s a building here that seems to get exactly what he saw, and then does its best to disappear into it.

Visit the official library website here.