"For once in a public building in Washington, there is excellence throughout."

Those were the words of the Washington Post's architecture critic, Wolf von Eckardt, in 1972 upon the opening of the Mies Van der Rohe–designed MLK Memorial Library.

We've heard precious little in recent days from the WaPo about the fate of the building, even as it's become increasingly clear that District developers and government officials emphatically do not share von Eckardt's flattering and considered opinion of the building. With last week's announcement that Benjamin Forgey, the WaPo architecture critic since 1981, will retire in June, I don't imagine that the paper has plans to act as an advocate for high architecture or as a local educator on the architectural and civic history of the District's most important Modernist building.*

Months ago readers of the WaPo—Metro section, not Style—were treated to a two-fer by Debbi Wilgorin (here and here ) concerning the library's administrative hurdles and the concomitant fate of the Mies building. On February 6, Wilgorin wrote:

[M]any civic activists and library advocates are reluctant to abandon the existing library named for the civil rights leader, which is a badly neglected but architecturally significant building designed by famed modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

A task force Williams appointed last year to study overhauling the library system estimates the cost of building and endowing a new central library at $280 million. The mayor and the library board, which he also appointed, say a top-quality public library would draw people to the new neighborhood. [Note to Mayor Williams et al.: The spot in the "new neighborhood" is located in the heart of gentrified DC . . . just two blocks from the Mies. —ed.] They also say the existing headquarters facility lacks the openness and flexible programming space that are the hallmarks of 21st-century libraries, and that it cannot be renovated and rewired to adequately serve today's patrons.

"Besides being depressing, and aside from all the deferred maintenance, the Mies building is a very inefficient building," said developer Richard Levy, who heads the library board's facilities committee. He said the city would get more value for its libraries by selling or leasing the Mies building as office space and putting the proceeds toward library improvements elsewhere.

Levy's interest is in moving new property, architectural landmark be damned. Neglecting the stamp of one of the Big Three (Mies, Wright, Le Corbusier) is an architectural crime.

It's been a crime long in the making, and one that contributes to Districters' disconnect with the building. Alexander Padro of the Recent Past Preservation Network writes about the effects of decades of neglect on the building:

As a result of the District of Columbia's chronic budgetary woes and spending less than a third of the national average on library building maintenance, the MLK Library has suffered significant neglect. Among the signs of neglect are stained and threadbare carpeting, inoperative drinking fountains, an HVAC system unable to provide consistent temperature throughout the building, long-abandoned dumbwaiter and pneumatic tube stations, and obsolete card catalogs built into the floor of the main lobby. Importantly, while much of the library's valuable Mies-designed furniture has been discarded, the building is virtually unchanged in terms of its appearance and plan since it opened. Three spaces on the fourth floor, the director's office, the board room, and the director's reception room, all of which have multiple pieces of original furniture by the architect, best reflect Mies' design esthetic.

Executive spaces, notably, that aren't well traveled by the daily library user. Not that it has to be that way. The DC Preservation League notes that, as one of the most functional buildings the architect ever designed, the MLK Library "was constructed with a flexible interior plan and the capacity to add a fifth story when needed. These measures were taken to ensure the building could continue to serve its intended purpose for approximately 150 years."

Setting aside for a moment the question as to whether the Mies serves the community well as a library—but noting in passing that there is no architect whose building could undergo 30 years of severe decline and still be prized by the community—other questions stand regarding Mayor Williams's business model for the future of the library. Writing in the Intowner in 2003, P.L. Wolff reports that the Mayor's plan vision called for a "smaller main library" in the old convention center—at a cost of $150 million. Since then, the Mayor's estimates for the new library headquarters have nearly doubled to $280 M.

His specific intentions for the Mies are no clearer. Richard Huffine, president of the Federation of Friends of the DC Public Library, writes that the Mayor has convened one public meeting on the Budget Support Act of 2007, which "would allow the current home of the main DC Public Library to be leased to a private entity for 99 years." (That April 11 meeting was not open to public testimony.)

More from the WaPo Metro desk: Minus site acquisition costs, the (most recent) mayoral estimate for the cost of the new library headquarters is $180 M. (Don't ask how this cost jibes with the Mayor's 2003 cost—it doesn't.) The new costs assumes a site acquisition bill of $100 million,* which the Mayor suggests will be offset by the lease of the Mies. While it might be reasonable to assume that a century lease for the property could garner $100 M, the costs to restore, refurbish, and repurpose the building are unclear. Assuming that these costs are minimal, why wouldn't the District pay to preserve the architectural gem in its pocket, thus saving the District at minimum $100 M in site acquisition costs?

If those restoration/refurbishing/repurposing costs are maximal, what assurances does Mayor Williams have that the linchpin sale in his plan is feasible? In other words, if the chips fall the right way for a developer, they could work for the District—more so, since the District already owns the building. If the cost is in fact no good for a developer, the Mies won't be developed. And if the Mies can't make for a decent library, what sort of project space can it provide? Who's going to lease a building that "cannot be renovated and rewired"?

Suspect is the fact that the Mayor has not completed a cost evaluation for restoring the Mies. According to architect Stuart Gosswein (excerpted by urban restoration consultant and blogger Richard Layman—and I apologize for the convoluted quoting, but follow me here):

In a letter dated February 20, 2006, the Committee of 100 asked the city's chief financial officer, Nat Gandhi, to undertake a cost analysis on renovating MLK vs. building a new structure. The letter to Dr. Gandhi was copied to the library task force and all members of the DC Council. There has been no response from Dr. Gandhi to date.

I have not read any followup to the question. If the cost evaluation has been performed and I simply don't know about it, as ever, I stand to be corrected. Frankly, isn't this a crucial piece of data—a question that should have been asked before February 2006? Shouldn't the Mies cost be square one (if you'll pardon the light pun)?

The Wlliams administration has provided one concrete estimate, anyway: $450 million, the cost of repairing the District's public library system. At a half-billion dollars to remake the entire system, I'm not convinced that a Modernist building is at the root of the problem. Nor is it apparent that a chi-chi, WiFi-enabled centerpiece library will solve those problems or serve the system's core underserved constituency. And even granting the Mayor's goals, it's not clear that the Mies can't be that building in the first place, at better cost and to the pleasure of architecture fans the world over. Or that a new flagship building won't undergo the same fate as the Mies, if the District doesn't address the substantive structural problems that created the mess in the first place.

The Mayor owes the District a few assurances. One, that he has his numbers straight—and that he's considering all the numbers. Two, that the Mayor doesn't plan to demote the District to the architectural backwaters by compromising the Mies. Third, that there actually is money to fix the baseball stadium library system, and it's not contingent on the sale of a building they've been badmouthing as impossibly retrograde for years. There's finally an opportunity to bend Mayor Williams's ear on Saturday, April 22 at 1:00 pm in the MLK Library, and I plan to put in my two cents—so if you care about the issue, I hope to see you there.

Is there any hope that the District can keep the Mies if the District government sells or leases the building? Can everything yet come up Millhouse? Short of inventing a new public purpose for the old MLK Library (contemporary arts center, anyone?), no. Divesting a public building of its public use, especially in such a rushed and unstudied job as the Mies has been given, is a surefire way to serve developers, not the city's non-federal architectural heritage. If it were extremely profitable to lease/renovate the library (so profitable, it'll practically pay for the new one!), we wouldn't be having this discussion—we'd be renovating the one we have. I'm not convinced that Mayor Williams's conviction that saving the library will be accomplished by abandoning the "depressing" Modernist aesthetic/delapidated building at a very high cost—which will be borne by the lease of the "depressing" Modernist aesthetic/delapidated building—is honest, much less responsible.

No, I expect brief public discussion, more of the financial shell game, followed by bulldozers and then a hotel.

---

One more link: read Leonard Minsky, who's written a great deal on the subject and advocated specifically for the public library system. Books—check 'em out!

* Ben Forgey's written about a Mies preservation project before, just not (to my knowledge) our Mies. A link to the article by Forgey about the Farnsworth house can be found on the sidebar to the right at this National Trust for Historic Preservation site—but the link to the WaPo article no long works. If any reader has a Lexis Nexis account or can otherwise find the original article, and would like to pass it on to me, I'd appreciate it.

** The cost of the Mies was $18 M (which adjusts to around $40 M; I'm pretty sure the reported $18 M is not adjusted for inflation). Unlike the current MLK Library, the proposed library site will not be a standalone building. What will we be getting for $100 M? This question is nearly moot in my mind, since you're not going to do better than a Mies.

UPDATE: Another Gay Republican (yes, another one) writes along the same lines. See you on Saturday, AGR.

UPDATE II: So Benjamin Forgey is still filing reports at WaPo—here's an article about the neighborhood politics surrounding the expansion of the Phillips Collection. I'd assumed that he just wasn't writing for the paper any longer. No one is better suited than Forgey to report on the issue, and no one is more obliged to do so.

Posted by Kriston at April 18, 2006 10:45 PM