John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library rises on a spit of land at Columbia Point in Boston, a stark white concrete tower joined to a soaring glass pavilion that opens onto the sea. Designed by the architect I. M. Pei and dedicated in 1979, sixteen years after Kennedy's assassination, it is widely regarded as the most architecturally distinguished of the presidential libraries, its modern lines a deliberate echo of a presidency that styled itself young and forward-looking.

The collections hold the records of Kennedy's thousand days in office — the Cuban Missile Crisis, the founding of the Peace Corps, the pledge to reach the moon, and the unfinished push on civil rights — along with the papers of his brother Robert and a major archive of the novelist Ernest Hemingway. The museum leans into the imagery of "Camelot," presenting the glamour and promise that the assassination froze in place.

Pei, then a relatively young architect, considered the commission the most important of his early career and would go on to design landmarks around the world. The building's setting on the water, lashed by harbor wind, gives it a austerity and grandeur the inland prairie libraries cannot match, and the glass pavilion with its single large flag has become one of Boston's signature modern views.

For visitors, the library is less a neutral archive than an experience of a presidency that ended in shock. Its film and exhibits carry the viewer from the 1960 campaign to the motorcade in Dallas, making the building both a research institution and a place of national mourning and memory.