posted on July 01, 2010 23:57
One of the biggest challenges in the construction of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas will be recreating the Oval Office, the architect overseeing the design of the center said Thursday.
"Several different presidential libraries have an Oval Office," said Graham S. Wyatt, partner with New York-based Robert A.M. Stern Architects. "None of them got it right."
The Oval Office in Bill Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., is about half the size of the real thing, and the one in Lyndon Baines Johnson's presidential library is about seven-eighths of scale, he said.
Another challenge will be capturing the spacial relationship and interaction between the Oval Office and the Rose Garden, Wyatt said. The Bush library to be built on the Southern Methodist University campus will have a "Texas Rose Garden," he said. The office itself will be furnished and set up the way it was during Bush's tenure in the White House, he said.
Wyatt spoke about the design process at an Urban Land Institute luncheon Thursday at the Four Seasons Hotel and Resort in Irving.
The three-story, 200,000-square-foot presidential library is shooting for Platinum-level certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, guidelines, Wyatt said.
Some of the green elements that will be incorporated into the construction include hot-water panels and photovoltaic panels on the roof, and large underground cisterns to catch storm water. Texas limestone, woods and other materials from within a 500-mile radius of the site will be used to minimize pollution caused by hauling construction materials over long distances, he added.
Construction on the library starts in November and will take about two years.
"This will be a major destination, a major contributor to economic development and a major addition to the SMU campus," Wyatt said.
June 24th, 2010 | Dallas Business Journal | Bill Hethcock