LUDWIG MIES

from Interior Design April 2022 – 90th Anniversary

INTERVENTION

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The only public library the great architect ever designed gets a major overhaul, 50 years after it opened

From top: Washington’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), opened in 1972, and recently renovated by Dutch firm Mecanoo and local studio OTJ Architects. Mies, as he was commonly known, relaxing with an ever-present cigar in 1964.

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“God is in the details,” as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe liked to say. That might explain why architect Francine Houben—creative director and founding partner of Mecanoo, which, together with OTJ Architects, modernized the architect’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington—often felt like Mies was “watching over one shoulder while over the other was Martin Luther King Jr.”

Commissioned in 1966, the city’s flagship public library was the only one Mies ever designed, but neither the architect nor the slain civil rights leader lived to see its completion in 1972. The 39,600squarefoot black box, a rectangular form with three glazed floors that float above a ground floor recessed behind a colonnade of black steel columns, suffered from years of delayed maintenance. The landmarked building had sprouted leaks, mold, and police tape (in places where windows frequently popped out of the expanding and contracting steel skeleton). Navigating the grim, garishly lit central stairs—actually enclosed behind metal fire doors—was a “terribly scary experience,” Houben says, although she was amused to see that patrons regularly staked out Mies’s coveted Barcelona chairs in the Great Hall lobby.

Mecanoo made the forbidding structure more inviting starting with the entry, where glazing replaced part of a brick wall to open sightlines onto a new serpentine stair, which provides vertical circulation all the way up to an entirely new fifth floor. In the Grand Reading Room on the third floor, the firm punched out part of the ceiling and filled the space with colorful spiral mobiles by Black fiber artist Xenobia Bailey to visually connect with the room above.

The civil rights leader might have appreciated Houben’s guiding principle “to reduce things to the essence” through “a clear architecture” and “honesty of materials.” With its brighter, more

Clockwise from top left: The Great Hall lobby, pre-renovation, furnished with Mies’s Barcelona chairs. Xenobia Bailey’s artwork hanging from the Grand Reading Room’s newly raised ceiling. One of two new staircases. The lobby’s freshly installed stadium seating beneath a restored 1986 mural by Don Miller.

Clockwise from top left: A white-oak slide, descending from the second-floor children’s library. Created by removing a brick wall, a sunken-terrace garden outside the new café. The 291-seat double-height auditorium, made possible by an added fifth floor. The new green roof. energy-efficient curtain wall and rooftop public garden, the library more than ever embodies King’s dictum that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” Mecanoo’s thoughtful, sentient reactivation is not only “more Mies than Mies,” Houben says, but also embodies his definition of architecture as “the will of an epoch translated into space: living, changing,

new.” —Laura Fisher Kaiser