John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Concrete tower and glass pavilion built on a former landfill, framing harbor views.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston opens with I. M. Pei's original design, an eighty-five-foot glass pyramid for a hill above Harvard Square that Cambridge neighbors fought off for over a decade until the Kennedy family gave up in 1975. It follows Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis choosing this harborside site instead, ten acres of landfill so full of buried refrigerators and rotting garbage that Pei joked a lit match could set the soil on fire. Budget trouble later forced Pei to trade the stone he wanted for precast concrete panels, cast ninety miles away in North Wilbraham and trucked in on flatbeds.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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