Everything in its Right Place

Sartogo and Grenon, Chancery to the Italian Embassy, 1993.

Sue and I drive by the chancery to the Italian Embassy frequently and agree that it's the nicest contemporary building on Embassy Row. I only recently discovered that it was designed by Piero Sartogo and Nathalie Grenon. It's maybe too sexy, okay, bearing too much resemblance to something like Philip Johnson's Gatehouse for some tastes, and I imagine that Sartogo's design would be a nightmare were it asked to correspond with any other building—that is, were it placed anywhere other than along Massachusetts Avenue. But Embassy Row is curious that way: Once a row of Beaux Arts–period homes built for the area's extremely wealthy, it's now a hodge-podge of Beaux Arts homes that serve as embassies for the world's poorest nations, while across the street, the world's wealthiest nations host a real-time exhibition on modern and contemporary architecture in the form of large residences and chanceries. It's a pleasant city feature, an embassy district. Area and extranational growth (and, you know, regime change) shuffle embassies around every so often, so you never know when an I. M. Pei building will pop up. And a chancery lends itself to formal experiment better than any other building—its purpose is being to make your nation look more awesome than other nations on the block (right?), show off motherland architectural talent, and host visitors and passing dignitaries.

One building that is expressly not suited for explorations in form is a library, which, in my authoritarian world, would all be the Boboli Gardens with stacks. It's hard to determine whether Mies van der Rohe or the District of Columbia government deserves more blame for the dreadful thing that is the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, which the Washington City Paper names as one of the District's most awful public spaces. It's not a Rem-Koolhaas-no one-can-find-the-bathroom difficult library; it's a library that invites you in but then forces you out as quickly as possible with its yellow lighting and threateningly low ceilings. I'm sure the building is a fine space so long as you're not books you're looking for, and I can't believe that there's a District reader or art viewer who wouldn't prefer the space as a contemporary art museum, which the District needs far more than an unused and unusable library. And though it's probably unwise urban planning to centrifuge a city's cultural resources along its economic clusters, I'm afraid that MCI Center–area real estate is much too hot to host a block-sized space that, while benefitting the community, brings zero economic incentive to the neighborhood. A contemporary art center would do both.

Besides, a van der Rohe contemporary art center? The building is the argument in itself. You can't sweeten that deal.

Mies van der Rohe, the MLK Memorial Library, 1968.

UPDATE: I'm hardly the first to suggest the van der Rohe DC|CAC, by the by. Dawns on everyone over time.

UPDATE II: I knew someone had mentioned the MLK proposal recently, but couldn't remember who. It was Tyler Green, of course. If I recall correctly, he's championed this cause for a long time (hell, he probably came up with it). I used to spend a lot of time volunteering at a gallery near the MLK library, and my co-volunteers and I would try to come up with the best sculpture for the empty space in front of the library (which is mentioned in the WCP article).

And courtesy of DCist I see that Washington Post Metro section columnist Marc Fisher once suggested that the DC library system could make up its budget shortfall by selling the MLK building and moving into a smaller shop on the site of the old convention center.