Over the past three years, members of the project team modernizing the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.—a Mies van der Rohe-designed landmark—have aced an array of challenges. They have had to convert a deteriorating 48-year-old building that suffered from years of deferred maintenance into an information center that fits the changing roles of 21st-century urban libraries. Then this year, as the project entered the home stretch, the team was hit with perhaps its biggest challenge of all: the coronavirus pandemic.
The $211-million job entailed replacing outdated mechanical systems and a failing exterior envelope. It also required balancing new interior reading areas with event and technology spaces while respecting Mies’ modernist design.