Page 27 - Summer_2019

ArchDC Summer 2019.qxp_Spring 2019 5/22/19 2:57 PM Page 25

Project: Cleveland Park Library,
3310 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC
Design/Build Architects: Perkins Eastman DC
Associate Architects: Perkins Eastman
Landscape Architects: Landscape Architecture Bureau
Structural Engineers: ReStl Designers
MEP Engineers: Setty & Associates
Civil Engineers: AMT, LLC
Traffic Engineers: Gorove/Slade
Library Consultants: Library Planning Associates
Lighting Consultants: Stroik Lighting Design
Sustainability Consultants: Heller & Metzger
Sustainability Consultants/Energy Modelers: In Posse
AV/IT/Acoustical Consultants: Shen Milsom & Wilke
Program Managers: Brailsford & Dunlavey
Design/Build Contractor: Gilbane Building Company
Design/Build Contractor Protégé: Saxon Collaborative Construction
North-facing façade of the library at the foot of Newark Street.
27,000-square-foot building was designed by Perkins stately Cleveland Park Post Office Building (1941).
Eastman DC (PEDC)—an affiliate of the global architecture The new library’s Connecticut Avenue façade, with its
firm Perkins Eastman Architects. PEDC’s work focuses on limestone and brick siding, large entry, and tall windows,
the design of community centers, government buildings, evokes the stripped classicism of many Roosevelt-era
educational facilities, housing, and large-scale mixed-use public buildings.
projects. Matthew J. Bell, FAIA, was the principal-in- “The façade develops a scale and language appropriate
charge for the Cleveland Park project. for a civic building located on one of the city’s main
The library is located on Connecticut Avenue thoroughfares,” the architects said. “The design reinterprets
between Macomb and Newark streets, NW, at the southern the limestone-framed entry of the original library building
gateway to the Cleveland Park commercial corridor. while asserting a new civic sense of place at the corner of
Connecticut Avenue cuts through the neighborhood’s Macomb and Connecticut, with a larger scale at the
street grid at an angle, creating a trapezoidal plot for the building’s entry and tall bay windows that support
library that faces commercial buildings to the east and generous interior light and define the street wall.”
north, and residential structures, including an apartment Many pre-war buildings built in the stripped classical
building and a number of the neighborhood’s single- style project a somber dignity or even a brooding majesty.
family homes, to the south and west. The trick in designing the new library was to capture the
The previous Cleveland Park Library, a rather modest dignity and majesty without appearing somber or brooding.
square feet. Its limestone exterior gave it a certain subdued provided an opportunity for employing a lot of glass to
The library’s large entry was key to achieving this, as it
structure built in the early 1950s, measured about 18,000
dignity, and it annually ranked among Washington’s top
lighten up the design.
three most heavily trafficked and circulating libraries. But
In the years before World War II, the stripped classical
“the building no longer met the needs of the community,” style was popular not only in the United States, but in
many other countries as well, including the fascist
PEDC said. “Although it was heavily used and well-loved,
powers and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The style thus has a
it lacked—aside from modern library amenities—a sense
of place appropriate for an important public resource.”
complex legacy, much discussed over the years by
During the firm’s community engagement process,
“residents of Cleveland Park voiced an interest in increased architectural historians and theorists, and often involving
after-the-fact associations with both democratic and
meeting space for community groups. The heavy usage authoritarian forms of government. The Cleveland Park
of the site and the desire for more significant meeting Library’s modest scale, absence of statist imagery, and
spaces for the community were primary drivers for the even its very function as a public library—a symbol of
[new library’s] design.” American democracy—clearly align the building with
The District in recent years has received acclaim for the democratic end of that spectrum.
the design of its new public libraries, several of which have As the building turns the corner from Connecticut
been covered in these pages (see, for example, the Winter Avenue to address Macomb Street to the south and
2010 and Spring 2013 issues). But while many of the Newark Street to the north, the rationale for the stripped
city’s new libraries are full-on modernist structures, the classical motifs recedes, and the building adopts a more
Cleveland Park Library is designed in a hybrid, historically purely modernist vocabulary. But on the building’s north
informed style that reflects the early 20th-century side, there is one more historically informed design detail
architecture of the adjacent commercial corridor, including of note: a rounded corner executed in brick that echoes
the Art Deco Uptown Theater (1936) and the small but those on nearby historic buildings, particularly the tightly

THE (QUIET) LIFE OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD 25