Roosevelt Presidential Library: Regenerative Living Building — Atelier 10

Biological model: Prairie grassland ecosystems and earth-sheltered geology

Company: Atelier 10

A 109,000 ft² presidential library achieving Living Building Standard certification through earth-sheltered design, local grazing agriculture for carbon sinking, and energy generation exceeding 105% of building needs.

The challenge

Large institutional buildings typically have massive carbon footprints from construction and operation, destroy the ecosystems on which they sit, and rely entirely on external energy inputs. Presidential libraries should honour conservation legacies but rarely do so through their own design.

Nature's strategy

Prairie grassland ecosystems where vegetation, soil biology, and grazing animals form a self-sustaining cycle. Earth sheltering mimics how burrowing organisms and geological formations use thermal mass for temperature regulation.

What was emulated

Earth sheltering for passive thermal regulation; green roof as habitat continuity; grazing-based carbon sequestration; solar energy harvesting exceeding needs; use of local materials to minimise transport carbon.

The innovation

An earth-sheltered library that seamlessly integrates into the prairie landscape, partners with local regenerative agriculture to create carbon sinks, generates 105% of its energy from solar, and uses ground-source heat pumps and bio-climatic strategies to eliminate the need for conventional HVAC.

Full case study

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is an ambitious regenerative design that achieved Living Building Standard certification—one of the most rigorous green building standards in the world. The design uses the Living Story methodology to understand what the North Dakota prairie landscape wants to do and how the building can enhance rather than diminish it. The architecture is partly earth-sheltered, built under a unifying green roof that protects from harsh winter winds while replacing the disrupted prairie vegetation and providing seamless habitat for local flora and fauna. The building uses exclusively local materials, meets holistic carbon neutrality, and leverages solar energy to generate 105% of its energy needs. Perhaps most innovatively, the project partners with a local rancher who grazes cattle on the surrounding land, using regenerative agriculture to rebuild topsoil, increase biomass, restore bird ecosystems, and establish a carbon sink that offsets the building's construction carbon. Bio-climatic strategies reduce the ecological footprint by building earth-sheltered structures that use the ground itself as thermal mass, supplemented by ground-source heat pumps that leverage free geothermal energy.