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Main reading room.

Duck Pond three blocks west can see it. In the former Arena’s superstructure was built by
building, the doors were in the middle of the west StructureCraft, an engineering, fabrication, and
facade, such that the pedestrian axis ended with a construction company based in Vancouver, British
blank brick panel. Columbia (which is also where Bing Thom’s firm, now
The new building is striking in its use of wood. known as Revery Architecture, is headquartered).
Perkins&Will had this in mind almost from the Perkins&Will’s Vancouver office had worked with
beginning when conceptualizing the building as a StructureCraft on other buildings: the introduction was
“pavilion on the park.” The essential aspects of any made, and “so many things fell in place,” according
simple pavilion are the roof and the columns or walls to Nancy Gribeluk, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP BD+C,
supporting that roof, so that was the starting point for managing principal at Perkins&Will’s Washington office.
the design. The “crinkle” roof design represents the
Perkins&Will noted that Southwest has many transformation of the folded plate motif from concrete
“architecturally strong” roof forms from the mid- (the preferred structural material of mid-century
century modern era, including the aluminum barrel Southwest, but now regarded as cold-looking,
vaults of architect Charles Goodman’s River Park town expensive, and carbon-intensive) to wood (warm,
houses, the butterfly roof of the Methodist church reasonably priced, and environmentally sustainable).
adjacent to the library, and the original Arena Stage The form also works well for the substantial
building (now called the Fichandler Stage, one of photovoltaic panel array on the roof (big enough to
three theaters within the Mead Center for American supply over half the library’s load, although under
Theater, as Arena Stage is formally known). The biggest the terms of the grant from the DC Department of
influence, however, was the 2010 expansion of the Energy and the Environment, the power generated
Arena Stage by architect Bing Thom, which features a goes directly into Pepco’s grid, where it earns credits
sinuous, knife-edged roof supported by wood columns that accrue to a Pepco program that offsets low-income
and floating over glass walls—basically, a giant pavilion. households’ electric bills.)

18 URBAN RE-RENEWAL