Design
The lead architect of the project was Edward F. Neild. Truman had picked Neild in the 1930s to design the renovation of the Independence and construction of the Kansas City Jackson County Courthouses after Truman was impressed with Neild's work on the Caddo Parish, Louisiana, Courthouse in Shreveport, Louisiana. Neild was among the architects of the Truman White House reconstruction.
Neild died on July 6, 1955, at the Kansas City Club while working on the design.
Truman had initially wanted the building to resemble his grandfather Solomon Young's house in Grandview, Missouri.
In response to a New York Times review that recalled Frank Lloyd Wright influences in the library's horizontal design, Truman was reported to have said, "It's got too much of that fellow in it to suit me."
Built on a hill overlooking the Kansas City skyline on land donated by the City of Independence, the Truman Library was dedicated on July 6, 1957, in a ceremony which included the Masonic Rites of Dedication; those attending the ceremony included former President Herbert Hoover, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
A $23 million dollar renovation of the entire facility was completed in 2001 on a design by architects Gould Evans. The changes included the extensive use of glass in the relatively windowless structure and significantly altering the space between Truman's grave and the museum.
Read more about this topic: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library And Museum
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.”
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“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
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“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)