Yankee Pyramids

99% Invisible · Sep 21, 2021 · 1h 4m

Presidential libraries are tributes to greatness, "[a] self-congratulatory, almost fictional account of someone's achievements, where all the blemishes are hidden," explains one New York architect. But they're also a "weird mix of a historical repository of records and things that have a lot of meaning." Studying their origins and evolution, one can begin to see how presidential libraries have always involved tensions and contradictions.

Yankee Pyramids

The premise of using the extreme example of Trump to heighten the contradictions of executive branch norms is what we do on Roman's other…