As an eight-year-old in New York City, the future executive director of the DC Public Library was first allowed to visit his local library all by himself, where he spent hours poring over books about reptiles and sports.
 
“I pretty much grew up in the Queens Public Library,” says Richard Reyes-Gavilan, tapped to run DCPL in January. In adulthood, he spent most his career working in the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), primarily at each system’s central library.
 Reyes-Gavilan hopes that the library renovation can incorporate open stairways, rather than these caged-off, dark and sometimes scary spaces
Those formative years bred in Reyes-Gavilan, the third son of Cuban immigrants, not only a passion for books and reading but “a particular affinity for large buildings,” he says. So when D.C. offered him the top job in this city’s public library system, the challenge of overseeing a full renovation of another prominent central library – in this case the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, at 901 G Street NW – was too tempting to pass up.
 
“I’ve undergone a general master planning process at the BPL, never a full renovation,” he said in a recent interview with Elevation DC. With the MLK library, “we are dealing with a historic landmark. We want a spectacular renovation of a modernist masterpiece.” The trick, he says, is to preserve the architectural integrity of the building while making improvements to the poor lighting, dank stairwells and counterintuitive access to upper floors that have long plagued the place.
 
The library was designated an historic landmark in 2007. Since then, its renovation has been awarded to D.C.-based firm Martinez + Johnson Architecture and Dutch firm Mecanoo. DCPL is holding a series of meetings around the city to provide a forum for residents to share with the architects and with library staff what they like and dislike about the current building, and what they hope to gain from the redesign. (Recent reports suggest that in order to accommodate residents' full wishlist, the new library will have to occupy the entirety of the building, plus a fifth-floor suite, rather than the half of the building originally proposed.)
 
Reyes-Gavilan attends as many of these meetings as his schedule allows. “It’s important for people to know that we take [their input] very seriously.” His task, he says, is to balance all that  feedback from library patrons with a “responsibility to retain [Mies’] architecture.”
 
The architect in question, commonly referred to as simply “Mies,” is Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, the noted German-American architect who died in 1969, the year Reyes-Gavilan was born. Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are widely considered the masters of modern architecture. Their signature buildings fill city blocks all over the globe.
 
“Mies’ buildings were designed to be flexible,” Reyes-Gavilan says. In the D.C. central library, “there is a lot of space to give us leeway to do things, but also to respect the bones of what a Mies building is. The steel and the glass and the loggia will not go away, though. This building will remain” recognizable not only to those who know Mies’ signature look – a glass “skin” stretched over “bones” of steel – but also to anyone who’s ever spent time in cities, where modernist architecture took hold decades ago.
 
DCPL’s current estimated cost for the MLK library renovation ranges from $225 - $250 million. “Most of the construction money is in the fiscal 2018 budget,” Reyes-Gavilan says. “We hope to move that up.”
 
Whether or not that is likely to happen is anyone’s guess, however. The lead regulatory agency for the renovation is the National Capital Planning Commission, which by law must consider the renovation’s impact on adjacent properties, the environment and other variables. D.C.’s Historic Preservation Review Board, the Historic Preservation Office, the US Commission of Fine Arts, the D.C. government and the Board of Zoning Adjustment are also stakeholders in the multi-year process.
 
This third-floor room has traditionally been a "staff-only" room, despite the floor-to-ceiling windows and open sight lines. The plan is to open this room to the public

For now, just about everything is on the table as to how the future library will serve the community and what it will look like. In addition to consideration of the flaws and strengths of the current and future building’s physical plant, new roles are under consideration for the library, such as its use as a “maker space:” a type of community gathering place for people to create and invent things with tools, software and other supplies, a role many libraries around the world are exploring as they seek to broaden their range of services.  Also being discussed is the addition of new programs aimed at city youth, job seekers, young families moving into the Gallery Place neighborhood and other constituencies.
This storage room is destined to become a "fabrication lab" with machines for the public to use

Another prominent consideration: “how the library can better honor and respect the namesake of the building, the legacy of Dr. King,” Reyes-Gavilan says. Whether artist Don Miller’s King Mural, the focal point of the great hall, will stay in its current position or be moved elsewhere in the building is but one talking point. The painting was unveiled January 20, 1986, the first day that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was observed as a national holiday.
 
“We’ve talked about opening the wall under the mural into an amphitheater,” Reyes-Gavilan says. “We want to activate parts of this building that have been quiet and dormant for a ling time.”
 
“Mies himself said famously that this building would never be finished,” he said in conclusion. “I think he understood more than others that the way in which information would be disseminated would change. He left us a good envelope in which to rearrange the contents.”