Bush library plan a notably sedate building design

Love him or hate him, George W. Bush presided over one of the noisiest presidencies in history. There were debates over wars of necessity and wars of choice, alarm and rancor over ballooning budgets and new social entitlements, a bold mix of political and religious rhetoric, and the projection of American power into places where it was largely unwanted. The Bush years, on a decibel meter, are up there with a NASCAR rally.

Which makes the cool, quiet and dignified design of his presidential library — unveiled in Dallas on Wednesday — a rather odd architectural postscript to eight dramatic years of governance.

Architect Robert Stern's plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Center call for a low-slung building of brick and limestone, following traditional lines and hugging the Texas landscape with a calm reserve. It's almost as if Bush has chosen to retreat into the patrician reticence of his blue-blooded, Connecticut forebears.

The library, scheduled to break ground in November 2010 and estimated to cost $250 million, will be built on the campus of Southern Methodist University, and it will house public exhibition space, a mock-up of the Oval Office, a conference center with 364-seat auditorium, and separate entry and offices for scholars.

Visitors will enter through "Freedom Hall," emblazoned with an American flag on its ceiling and capped by a square glass box that allows natural light to flow in.

Freedom Hall is about the only gesture to the fetish for branding architectural elements that clutters so many of today's public buildings with meaningless labels. The American flag is a rare flourish in a structure that is designed to sit easily and unobtrusively on the landscape, designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh.

It is all self-consciously attuned and consonant with the SMU campus, a hyper-dignified collection of buildings with porticos and white columns that look like they were designed by Thomas Jefferson unconstrained by a budget.

Compare this with the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, the shape of which recalls the 42nd president's oft-repeated "bridge to the 21st century" metaphor. Created by Polshek Partnership, the Clinton library is a flashy, contemporary confection of aluminum and glass, with dramatic cantilevers and a high-tech gloss.

Although Polshek's work in Washington has tended to the empty and meretricious (e.g., the Newseum and desperately flawed plans for a visitors center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), their library for Clinton achieved the brass ring of all too many architectural endeavors: instant iconic status.

Stern, by contrast, is all about context, historical reference and carefully calculated detail. As one of the earliest and most insightful analysts of the architectural styles that succeeded modernism, Stern often was lumped in with the postmodernists.

Much of his portfolio, which includes the tallest building in Philadelphia (the Comcast Center) and a passel of retro libraries and academic buildings, is utterly unmemorable, filled with reconfigurations of basic architectural forms clad in familiar stone or brick, with unapologetic reference to traditional ornament.

But he has never aimed for, or achieved, the vivid banality of the movement he helped to define. And he is full of surprises, such as the bristling modernity of his federal courthouse in Richmond, which looks like it could withstand a nuclear blast without a scratch on its flawless surface.

Stern is the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and it's tempting to read something into that, as if Bush is reconnecting with his (and his father's) alma mater.

Banished from the library that will memorialize him (and all presidential libraries are living sepulchers) is the strident populism, the lazy drawl and the bellicose posturing that so irked his critics.

The most salient architectural element has nothing to do with the basic shape or profile of the building, but rather its internal and external systems.

The building will be built to the highest environmental standards — a platinum rating on the popular LEED standards system — with recycled and locally sourced materials, solar hot-water panels and an efficient system to capture and reuse rain water.

And so the environmental sensitivity that many Bush partisans mocked in figures such as Al Gore is now built into the Bush presidential library, which isn't necessarily an inconsistency.