MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. MEMORIAL LIBRARY HABS DC-887 (Downtown Central Library) HABS DC-887 901 G Street Northwest Washington District of Columbia PHOTOGRAPHS WRITTEN HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE DATA REDUCED COPIES OF MEASURED DRAWINGS HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, DC 20240-0001 HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. MEMORIAL LIBRARY (DOWNTOWN CENTRAL LIBRARY) HABS No. DC-887 Location: 901 G Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. The site is located on the southern half of Square 375 (bound by Ninth, Tenth, and G Streets and G Place, Northwest) on Lot 825, which is located at the northwest corner of the intersection of G and Ninth Streets, Northwest, and which encompasses approximately 76,000 square feet of land area. The Library is located at latitude: 38.898696, longitude: -77.024852. The coordinate represents a point to the center of the building and was obtained on March 28, 2017 using Google Earth (WGS84). There is no restriction on its release to the public. Present Owner/ Occupant: District of Columbia Public Library (DCPL) Present Use: Public library Significance: The Martin Luther King Jr., Memorial (MLK) Library was constructed between 1968 and 1972 to serve as the Downtown Central Library for the District of Columbia. Replacing the Neoclassical style Carnegie Library (1903) on Mount Vernon Square, the International style MLK Library was designed and developed as part of a larger urban renewal plan for downtown Washington, D.C. during the mid-twentieth century. The only dedicated library building designed by the internationally re nowned Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, MLK Library is one of the few great Modernist buildings to have ever been constructed in the District and is an important example of the International style in the nation’s capital. Although it appears that Mies himself had little direct oversight of the building’s design, which was managed by architects under his employ, including Gene Summers and Jack Bowman, the building’s design exhibits many of the distinguishing features of Mies’s singular architectural principles, most notably his emphasis on form and function over stylistic concerns and his use of structural expressionism. A recognizable example of his work, MLK Library is defined by the exterior MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. MEMORIAL LIBRARY HABS No. DC-887 (page 2) expression of the building’s structural elements and its use of modern building technology and materials, including precast concrete, steel framing system of girders and wide-flange columns, and curtain wall system allowing for the use of wide expanses of plate glass. In 2007, the property was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the work of a master and (as emblematic of its importance) as a property that has achieved significance at less than fifty years of age. Historian (s): Kimberly De Muro and Bill Marzella EHT Traceries, Inc. 2017 Project Information: In order to document the appearance and integrity of MLK Library in advance of a major rehabilitation project, DCPL has commissioned the preparation of HABS Level One documentation on the MLK Library building. The rehabilitation represents the first comprehensive modernization of the building since its completion in since its completion in 1972. The HABS historical report was completed by EHT Traceries: Laura Hughes, Principal; Bill Marzella, Project Manager; and Kimberly De Muro, Historic Preservation Specialist. Sections of this documentation have been excerpted from The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library Historic Structure Report Volume I: Site History, Existing Conditions, & Recommendations for Treatment, completed for DCPL by EHT Traceries, Inc. and Martinez and Johnson Architecture in December 2016. PART I. HISTORICAL INFORMATION A. Physical History: 1. Date of Erection: MLK Library was constructed between 1968 and 1972. The groundbreaking ceremony for the Downtown Central Library was held on July 31, 1968.1 While the library was under construction, the DCPL Board of Trustees voted to rename the library “The Martin Luther King Memorial Library” at their meeting on January 14, 1971. (The original name designation excluded the “Jr.” from King’s name, as did the associated signage used in the building.)2 Eight months later, the library 1 Robert J. Lewis, “Mayor Breaks Ground for Central Library,” The Evening Star, August 1, 1968, 25, NewsBank. 2 The Library’s Board of Trustees had previously voted on June 8, 1967 to name the new Central Library “Public Library, Washington D.C.” DCPL Board of Trustees, Minutes, January 14, 1971, 4, Martin Luther King Jr., Memorial (MLK) Library, Washingtoniana Divisions, Archives of the D.C. Public Library (DCPL), Series 8, Board of Trustees Records, 1896-1978; “Board Decides to Name New Library for King,” Evening Star, January 15, 1971, 20. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. MEMORIAL LIBRARY HABS No. DC-887 (page 3) officially opened on August 21, 1972, and was dedicated during the week of September 17, 1972.3 2. Architects/Engineers: MLK Library was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, an internationally renowned Modernist architect whose firm was located at 230 East Ohio Street (demolished) in Chicago, Illinois.4 Gene Summers, Mies’s former student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was hired as an architect for the firm in 1950. 5 After Mies’s health began to decline in the late 1950s, Summers served as the firm’s project manager for some of its most important commissions at that time, including the Seagram Building in New York City, the Chicago Federal Center, and MLK Library. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had an established and influential career in Germany as an educator and architect before emigrating in 1938, but it was his work in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s that established his reputation as the arbiter of the late Modern Movement. Mies’s signature aesthetic was so often borrowed and reinterpreted during the second half of the twentieth century that some have called it a Second International Style (the defining difference between that generation and the previous being an exterior expression of structural elements, rather than their concealment behind an outer sheath).6 When he immigrated to the United States in 1938, however, Mies was still relatively unknown to the American public outside a relatively small group of architectural critics and practitioners—despite having completed some of his most noted commissions, having served as director of the Bauhaus school, and having been featured in an influential exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He came to Chicago to head the architecture program at the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology, or IIT) at its new campus on Chicago’s South Side, and during the next decade his commissions were generally limited to buildings and plans for that campus.7 It was following a successful solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947— and his subsequent relationship with the developer Herbert Greenwald—that Mies’s characteristic design aesthetic emerged. His second collaboration with Greenwald, 860-880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, was constructed between 1949 and 1951 and established the basic formal, structural, and material qualities of his later work: a 3 DCPL Board of Trustees, Minutes, September 13, 1972, 2, MLK Library, Washingtoniana Divisions, Archives of the DCPL, Series 8, Board of Trustees Records, 1896-1978 4 Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 284. 5 Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, 284-285. 6 William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, Volume 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 228. 7 Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, 239-247. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. MEMORIAL LIBRARY HABS No. DC-887 (page 4) primarily metal (usually steel, sometimes aluminum or bronze) and glass material palette; pristine building volumes raised on stilted columns with a recessed loggia; and structurally expressionistic facades composed of vertical columns, glass and spandrel panels, and applied vertical I-beams. (Mies once stated: “I don’t think every building I put up needs to be different, since I always apply the same principles. For me novelty has no interest, none whatsoever.”8) Beyond the precise, rigorous formulation and fabrication of details, Mies’s projects all exuded the universality, clarity, and flexibility that are evocative of the rigors of classical architecture. This basic assemblage of elements would be repeated in nearly all of Mies’s projects over the next two decades.9 The work completed by Mies between 1951 and his death in 1969 included his most notable commissions: S.R. Crown Hall, the Seagram Building, Chicago Federal Center, Lafayette Park, and the Berlin National Gallery. His workload and office staff grew dramatically during this period, with Mies retiring from the directorship of IIT in 1958 to refocus his efforts on his growing list of international commissions.10 By the early 1960s, Mies’s failing health caused him increasingly to rely on his younger colleagues to oversee projects, at first Gene Summers and later Dirk Lohan, Joseph Fujikawa, and others; the formation of the “Office of Mies van der Rohe” in 1969 was reflective of the firm’s changing managerial structure.11 Mies’s reputation at this phase of this career was made evident by the glowing reception he received at the Commission of Fine Arts Meeting in February 1966, which he attended to present initial designs for the Downtown Central Library. During the Commission’s first review of the MLK Library design, the Commissioners referred to Mies as “a man we all look up to.”12 By this time, although Mies continued to exert a heavy influence on the aesthetic decisions of the architects under his employ, he had a less direct role in the management of the office or the design of most of its commissions.