Teach-In to Save MLK Library, June 7

Martin Luther King, Jr. Central Library, Washington, DC, Washington Post photo.

From Robin Diener, via themail:

Teach-In to Save MLK Library, June 7

There will be a teach-in to save Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library on Wednesday, June 7, at 6:30 p.m., at the Carnegie Science Building, 1530 P Street, NW, sponsored by the DC Library Renaissance Project. Free and open to the public.

The District's Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library is the first building erected under Home Rule, the first public building in the country dedicated to the slain civil rights leader, and the only library in the world designed by famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In 2000, at the request of Board of Library Trustees and in collaboration with library staff and users, the Urban Design Committee of the American Institute of Architects undertook a feasibility study for the renovation of MLK. The resulting proposal brings light, rationality and functionality to a building that was never completed to the architect's specifications and which has been allowed to fall into dire disrepair. In spite of opening to accolades in 1972, MLK Library is now widely perceived as a soulless, unwelcoming place where nothing works. The AIA study proposes a total transformation that resolves user complaints while preserving and completing the architect's vision.

Members of the Mayor's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Libraries say they were told by the mayor that the MLK Library could not be salvaged. They were never shown the AIA study. Now you (and they) can learn the details of the AIA renovation option (two drawings are on view at our web site) before the June 15 City Council hearing on the Mayor's plan to abandon our historic, stand-alone central library in favor of a smaller library, further from public transportation, sandwiched into a mixed-use development on a patch of the old Convention Center site. Your questions and concerns will be addressed by Kent Cooper, AIA, original lead architect of the design study, in an open Q & A. This event is free and open to the public.

If you can't attend but have questions, contact me at the E-mail above and I will get you answers.
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Note that I go back and forth about the MLK Library. I don't know if it can really be a good library, because it's a modernist building, an office building more or less, and a place that doesn't concern itself too much with people.

Above, the communication describes the MLK Library at present as a "soulless, unwelcoming place." Frankly, the same description of "soulless, unwelcoming place" can be made of many many fully maintained built-as-designed modernist buildings, especially those designed by "starchitects" such as Mies van der Rohe.

I do want a great central library in the city, and it will be interesting to see if the American Institute of Architects can convince us that this can be done with the MLK Library.

I won't be able to attend the session, as I will be away. But I hope someone will attend and send me a synopsis.

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