The approach taken by the architects for this public building bears some points of resemblance to Kevin Roche's Oakland Museum of 1969. Roche's desire was to submerge his building under a landscaped city park; the architects of the Des Moines research and museum building pursued a somewhat similar approach. There are, as one would expect, a number of differences between the two buildings. The 1980s Iowa building is a much more aggressively high-tech modernist design in its desire to display an encyclopedic array of late Modernist images; and the landscape proposed in Des Moines will never push the building into the background.