Washington, DC’s central library is about to get a major upgrade. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, designed by Modernist architect Mies van der Rohe and opened in August 1972, is undergoing a $208 million renovation that aims to make the interior better-suited for the information technology and space needs of its 21st-century users while honoring the building’s original, iconic design.

Located in the The District’s Chinatown area, the MLK library is the only library that van der Rohe ever built and is his sole structure in DC. The four-story, 400,000-square-foot space has a glass, steel and concrete shell, and inside it houses rows of books, meeting rooms and workstations, as well as a new computer lab and maker space. 

Although the library has so far gotten by on intermittent upgrades, a bigger overhaul is in order. In early March, the library shut its doors and began a three-year renovation that will see its previously closed-off interior opened up to make room for technology and collaborative space. The updated design also intends to bring multiple new features — including an auditorium and conference center, a ground-level cafe and patio, and a rooftop terrace with a view of downtown — into one place.

Construction Dive spoke with Tom Johnson, co-founder and principal of the Washington, DC-based Martinez+Johnson Architecture, about historical renovations and his work as the principal-in-charge behind the MLK project with Netherlands-based architects Mecanoo. 

When you took on the MLK Library renovation project, was the goal to preserve Mies van der Rohe’s original design, but with a contemporary twist, or to expand the functionality of the existing space?

JOHNSON: It’s really all of those things. Most of our (Martinez + Johnson’s) work has involved renovating existing cultural buildings. With the library, initially, some people look at it and think ‘What’s historic about it?’ But you’ve got to remember [that] when this building was built, it was a heroic building, and there are a number of people still around who remember when it was built. Our approach to this building is similar to other projects we’ve done, and that goes back to the original architect’s intent.

People look at this … and say we do historic preservation, and yes, we do – [but] it’s adaptive reuse, it’s never put back to what it was supposed to do in the beginning. What we’re doing is repositioning [these spaces] for the 21st century. We don’t want to change the overall organization, and we don’t have a desire to make changes just to make changes. We’re trying to position the building’s original elements to have another generation of use.

How do you design a library to meet continual changes in its users’ information needs and how they generally use spaces?

JOHNSON: On the inside, libraries have changed. They’re no longer primarily about books, they have all sorts of other municipal functions. Mecanoo is starting to redefine what a 21st-century library would be, and we’re taking those ideas and creating a language that identifies the library as new kind of destination for a much broader circumference of users.

You don’t want to put in stuff that, by the time you install it, the next generation has taken over. Technology, especially, challenges architects in general. It’s this problem of, by the time we’ve made this huge investment in infrastructure and the infrastructure gets outdated, what resources do you have to update it? [The library] was originally done on a budget [that didn’t leave much room for forecasting new spatial and technological needs], but this [renovation] was an opportunity to get the technology right, at least for now. At its moment [upon renovation], it will be unsurpassed. We want to get it right and design a building that works for our time.

How do you reconcile preserving some aspects of an older design with the need to upgrade it for contemporary use?

JOHNSON: Quite often when we work on one of these historic buildings, we have to measure the building ourselves with high-level technology, build models and distribute them to everyone, but there isn’t a lot of [historical documentation of the buildings available]. To bring this building back to exactly what it looked like in 1972 doesn’t achieve the mission; we haven’t solved the problem. We could go back and rectify the building systems’ problems or restore the envelope, and do all those things easily, but we won’t have made this level of conversion. We looked to design the building from the inside out.

Before we got involved, the DC Public Library had already started looking at some of the building’s problems. It was about what we do with all these elements — not only improving them so that they work better, but coming up with new units that are [able to stand the] test of time.

What have been your strategies for preserving the building’s relationship to the surrounding area, as well as the present day?

JOHNSON: In all cases, we try to memorialize a building’s original design so that one could understand what the future [will be] but also what the past was. It’s a much more subtle approach. Sometimes there’s an idea with a historic resource where we want to make a statement. Our sources are Martin Luther King Jr. and his writings, but they also go back to Mies and his design.

As part of this program, we’ve let Dr. King’s writings and his general spirit of civil discourse, transparency and accessibility — these elements in his writing and this sort of universal democracy — inform what the library is about. There’s little in the library that will be closed off to people.

Culturally, socially, programmatically, systematically — any way you can look at it there’s a transparency and involvement with the larger community. When you do cultural programs, those opportunities become apparent. A lot of our projects have been restorations and quite often those buildings have rich histories. The context of the building filters into these projects. Sometimes it’s in the architecture itself — there’s a reason these buildings are considered nationally significant. The buildings all tell a story about their communities, so you just try to be appreciative as the ones making changes to the original architect’s design.

So, when you’re designing the library for today, you also are thinking about the library 50 years from now?

JOHNSON: There’s guess work. I think the infrastructure work should last a long time. We’re not completely replacing the infrastructure. We feel we’ve positioned ourselves for a generation and what happens beyond that generation because of the speed of change is hard to project, but the elements will be contemporary and feel that way for some time going forward.

You have to look at the character-defining features of the building. With the library, there was an unrelenting quality and a discipline to things that wasn’t completely apparent. You have to determine which elements were really important to the original architect, which were kind of important, and which were probably later additions or afterthoughts.

How do you prepare for renovations to a historical building that needs to meet the needs of the present but is also forward-thinking?

JOHNSON: We’ve been privileged to work on projects that are catalytic. We’ve looked at theaters rebuilt in downtowns, whether new or restored, that have this incredible economic impact on their locales. They might bring 2,000 people a night to that area where people will have dinner before, need car parking, maybe get a drink after, and that’s been a model everywhere. Every municipality that’s done this type of project has reaped incredible economic benefits. As a cultural building, the library will have that same impact.

For Mecanoo, [the MLK library] was such a strong theme with their other projects — the theme of the building as having multiple destinations. We’re putting destinations in these buildings. It’s the idea that people have come to the building to do these things — it’s the journey of knowledge. If people are not here to do research or check out books, then they’re here for a symposium, a class or a performance.