Another take on Brutalism

Just a brief follow-up to my previous post on historic preservation: 

The Washington Post’s Roger Lewis (who is also on the architecture faculty at the University of Maryland) has a creative point of view regarding the Brutalist downtown Washington church I led with last time:  preserve it, but improve it with modifications that make it better-suited to today’s circumstances.

He has a similar recommendation for DC’s Martin Luther King, Jr. public library, designed by the great Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe but, say some, not functioning particularly well as a library.  Personally, I like the idea of saving the MLK library, with its clean black rectangles that are so typical of Mies’s work.  And if it takes some modifications to make that happen, I’m all for it.  I’m not so sure about the church, particularly with regard to whether it can be made to work for its congregation as well as for the streetscape.  But Roger’s view on the subject is an interesting one, and you can read his column here.

I highly recommend Roger's occasional “Shaping the City” columns, which the Post unfortunately tends to bury deep within the Saturday real estate pages.  He is sort of DC’s answer to the nationally syndicated and wonderful Neal Peirce, and I always learn from his takes on what makes a region smart and great, even if I don’t always agree.  Almost two decades ago, Roger’s columns were collected in a book, also called Shaping the City, now out of print.  I wish someone would do an update.