President Theodore Roosevelt is big business in the tiny North Dakota town of Medora: population 121 at the last census. He decamped to this town while mourning, after his wife and mother died within hours of each other on Valentine’s Day 1884. He lent his name to the adjacent national park (the only one in the National Park Service named for a single person). The Rough Riders Hotel downtown has one of the largest private collections of books written by or about the 26th president. There’s a one-man dinner (or brunch) show featuring an actor playing T.R., and he even factors into the Medora Musical, an open-air revue that’s operated since 1965.
This Fourth of July, the town welcomed its most impressive tribute yet to the legendary politician: the $450 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which took about three years to complete. It’s a dazzling, eco-friendly space that centers interactivity and storytelling over static exhibits and archives, and I recently toured the building just before it opened, guided by Matt Briney, the library’s chief communications officer.
The library’s relationship with the land
Inside the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, soaring rammed-earth walls, natural light, and locally sourced materials reflect the region’s landscape while supporting the building’s ambitious sustainability goals.
Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library
Medora is located way out in western North Dakota, surrounded by badlands and prairie. But despite the all-American environs, the project was conceived by Snøhetta, a Norwegian-born architecture firm known for such projects as the Oslo Opera House, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Aaron Dorf, the firm’s director and sustainability and building design lead, tells Afar, “The entire project was guided by one central idea: ‘The library is the landscape.’ Rather than placing a building within the badlands, we proposed that the landscape itself becomes the primary architectural experience.”
The sprawling, low-slung library practically melts into the top of a butte, with a grass-covered living roof and expansive windows that guide visitors’ gazes toward the badlands. A nearly mile-long boardwalk cuts through the adjacent prairie, offering views of sites that were meaningful to a young Teddy: the area where he got off the train for the first time in Medora, the land where he had his first ranch, the national park that bears his name.
The design aligns with Teddy’s adventurous spirit. Dorf says, “It’s the only presidential library that can be accessed by hiking trail, mountain bike, car, or horseback.” (There are hitching posts outside, and the library has its own trailhead connecting to the 144-mile Maah Daah Hey Trail.)
Game-changing sustainability initiatives
Roosevelt was one of the forefathers of the American conservation movement, so it’s only natural that the building would be eco-friendly—but Snøhetta is pushing that to the extreme. The library will be pursuing Living Building Challenge certification, the most rigorous regenerative green building standard in the world.
“It’s essentially if you take LEED Platinum sites and put them on steroids,” Briney says. “Only 35 buildings in the world meet the criteria.” The guiding framework is a “four zeros” approach: zero energy, zero water, zero carbon emissions, and zero waste, plus a full ecological restoration of the 93-acre site, which includes projects like cattle grazing, haying, and controlled burns.
To see the coolest eco-initiative at the site, you don’t even have to enter the building. As part of the Native Plant Project, ecologists, landowners, students, and community volunteers collected and propagated seeds from the surrounding prairie. The resulting living roof is now home to more than 200 native plant species, which will help the biodiversity of a critically endangered ecosystem. Wildlife is already returning.
Inside, materials include reclaimed wood, low-carbon concrete, and rammed-earth walls in the atrium—“26 feet tall for the 26th president,” Briney says. The rammed-earth walls are made with multicolor soils collected from within about 50 miles of the site, resulting in a layered look that mirrors the geology of the badlands. Skylights, meanwhile, connect to solar tubes that funnel natural light into the galleries, reducing the need for electrical lighting.
Historic artifacts on display
Interactive galleries immerse visitors in Theodore Roosevelt’s life, displaying historic artifacts such as his 1884 pocket diary, opened to the page where he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life,” after the deaths of his wife and his mother.
Courtesy of Getty/Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library
“Ted heads”—the nickname given to Roosevelt superfans—will nevertheless be wowed by the collection of historic artifacts on display, many of which are on loan from other National Park Service sites: a Rough Rider uniform from his Spanish American War days, his compass, his buckskin outfit, and taxidermy specimens from his travels still labeled with his handwritten tags.
Especially moving is his 1884 pocket diary, on loan from the Library of Congress. “After the death of his wife and mother, he draws an ‘X’ in it and writes, ‘The light has gone out of my life,’” Briney says. “We’ve dedicated an entire gallery space for that here, and it’ll be open to that page.”
Also on display are his eyeglass case and folded campaign speech, which he was carrying on October 14, 1912, during an assassination attempt in Milwaukee; the bullet passed through both before hitting him—meaning they very well might have saved his life.
Galleries built for interactivity
Immersive adventure galleries use projection technology, interactive storytelling, and AI to transport visitors into pivotal moments and places from Theodore Roosevelt’s life, from the Amazon rainforest to the Spanish American War.
Courtesy of Getty/Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library
“Presidential libraries are definitely changing,” Briney says. “You’re seeing more of them become these kind of experiential institutions. In fact, we’re not going to have a lot of our archives on-site.” Rather than house Roosevelt’s papers, the library has been working to digitize them and make them more accessible to visitors.
In addition to the historical artifacts, the defining part of the experience here is a series of “adventure galleries,” rooms designed to mimic the many dramatic chapters of Roosevelt’s life. In one dedicated to the Spanish American War, you’ll meet members of the Rough Riders to see the diversity of the unit and then follow their progress on a battle map. In another, about his trip down the uncharted Amazon, you’ll get into a boat with Teddy and float down the river with him (played by Severance actor Michael Chernus), as 16 projectors transform the walls and floors into the South American jungle. “It feels like you’re right there with him,” Briney says. “You go down rapids, you see piranhas.”
There’s a replica of his childhood brownstone in New York, a Pullman car that rumbles as if it’s moving, and even a space where kids can climb through the White House fireplace and play around in the rafters just as his rowdy kids (nicknamed “the White House Gang”) once did.
And in a re-creation of his Elkhorn Ranch, guests sit on cottonwood logs that were harvested along the Little Missouri River by local ranchers and listen to campfire stories; then they create their own digital cattle brands and learn how to herd livestock.
Engaging with Roosevelt’s political legacy
Of course, like any U.S. president, Teddy Roosevelt has a complicated legacy: For every positive achievement on his record—pioneering the conservation movement, winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomacy—he has a history of racist remarks, destructive Native American policies, and expansionist imperialist aims.
The new library doesn’t shy from that. “It’s a lot easier to build a presidential library for someone who has passed,” Briney says. “We have the luxury of over 100 years of time to be able to reflect on [his legacy], and the big mission of the organization is to humanize, not lionize. We do tell the stories that are difficult.” As part of that mission, they worked closely with the Native tribes of the Dakotas to tell their perspective on topics like conservation and land management.
“Rather than creating a monument to Theodore Roosevelt, we wanted to create an experience where visitors could form their own understanding of his legacy,” Dorf explains. Upon entry, visitors are given a radio-frequency-identification–enabled wristband that enables them to interact directly and personally with exhibits. In the campaign trail section, for instance, visitors pick their top political issues, which then generates a digital election poster. When they get to the White House, they can see how that platform would fare as Roosevelt dealt with popular opinion, the economy, the press, and Congress.
In the Oval Office, you can strike up a conversation with an AI-enabled digital version of Roosevelt; you may have seen President Trump ask him questions about the Panama Canal during his opening weekend visit earlier this month.
“We’ve been taking the effort to digitize all his papers, his correspondences, all the speeches, everything about him—so this large language model knows everything about Theodore Roosevelt,” Briney says.
And what happens if someone asks a rude or inappropriate question? “We’ve tried it. We’ve run it through all the paces,” Briney says. “And it’s like . . . you just told the president of the United States a dumb comment. He corrects you real quick.”
Making a full day out of the visit
The library’s native prairie living roof is planted with more than 200 indigenous species, helping restore biodiversity while making the building one of the country’s most ambitious sustainable design projects.
Photo by Threefold
The presidential library also aims to offer an alternative to Medora’s notoriously meat-and-potatoes-focused food scene in the form of the on-site restaurant Salt + Scoria, named for native saltbush and the red rock that gives the badlands their trademark color.
At the helm is Candace Stock, a Culinary Institute of America–trained chef and member of the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) Nation. She’s a forager and farmer, and she eschewed Native American culinary clichés in favor of dishes that speak to the region. As Briney explains, “No fried foods whatsoever, all healthy, from the land, made fresh.” That means dishes like North Dakota wild rice salad with smoked salmon; grilled bison sandwiches; green chile pozole with hominy and tepary beans; and even a venison and beef chili made using Teddy’s old recipe.
Best of all, the restaurant will box up your lunch as a to-go picnic, so you can take it outside to the living roof, picnic tables along the boardwalk, or even to a medicinal garden organized with the help of the MHA (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) Nation.
As you leave the library, all the data that’s been collected from interactive exhibits you engaged with is synthesized into a personalized letter from T.R. with resources on how to continue your education at home. “We like to say that you came thinking you’d learn about Theodore Roosevelt,” Briney says, “and it’s really designed to teach you about yourself.”
