Strangely PowerPoint’s voice-overs with robotic voices are still selling ideas of green harmonious happy make-believe communities, merely playing on emotions of possible buyers. Most of these projects only contribute to an evanescent, non-sustainable way of doing urbanism. Urban investments are mostly equal to building infrastructure or investing in the area by building large-scale projects that will ‘fix’ the city by offering a programmatic complexity. Architecture is reduced to a service industry and becomes purely a symptom treatment. This project can be seen as a critique of this paradigm of progress. The architectural ambition of the project is to create a new urban condition instead of prescribing predictable architecture as an antidote. It is not analytical but in stead it is a proposition for form. Until now the Presidential libraries, edifices of political power always have celebrated the individual in which the role of the attraction overshadows the memorial. Should the archive not reflect on political affairs instead? Which means not building to a person but building to the laws, the society. As history has shown a lot of knowledge is received from learning from the past. The archive is not a new concept regarding collective memory; ever since ancient Rome the Tabularium was the place to store official legal documents. The actual power of the Tabularium lays in its secrecy as it is closed by nature. How can we represent the content without the content being visible and thus reflect on the presence of the eternal absence?  A building which only goal is to achieve eternity, with mainly indirect users and no visible content. The autonomous character of the project can be seen as a critique on the predictable, homogenous condition in architecture today. The object in architecture is always seen as irresponsible, but can the object in this particular context not be a generator? (Whiting 2015) Is there a potential in an extreme reduction? A mega form, as a continuation of the American tradition of massive scales but more important, a remembrance of the power of the Cartesian grid. By proposing a mini grid in a rigid manner, a sequence of hallways lays the focus on the process of conserving, preservation and presenting the Presidential artefacts. The apparatus of the archive becomes visible and triggers the emotion of the viewer by its mystic; the labyrinth encourages the ‘urban wanderer’ in each one of us. As a democratic act the monumental structure focuses on remembrance of a national collective memory instead of the glorification of one single individual, resulting into a shared destiny of transformation.
