DCPL Eyes Long-Overdue
Main-Library Modernization
After several years of struggling along with other district departments to regain a solid fiscal footing, District of Columbia Public Library officials are eyeing several options for modernizing the system’s central library. “We need to have a building that people are proud of in their downtown, and that’s not what we have now,” Director Molly Raphael said in the December 28 Washington Post.
Raphael favors a $75–$80-million overhaul of the present Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library—a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe facility whose faulty environmental system and labyrinthine layout has constituted an operational nightmare since its 1972 opening—over building a new library on the site of the soon-to-be-razed Washington Convention Center.
As proposed by an architectural committee working pro bono, the renovated King library would gain a fifth floor as designed by van der Rohe but abandoned during construction for lack of funds, as well as clearer glass windows and a lightening of van der Rohe’s minimalist black, beige, and gray color scheme.
A building plan is due in September from the Arizona consultancy of Providence Associates. If funding is obtained, construction could begin as early as 2003.
Posted January 1, 2001.
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