Washington, D.C.’s Martin Luther King Memorial Library is the district’s only building designed by acclaimed architect Mies van der Rohe, but Benjamin Forgey says you wouldn’t know it from the way the landmark building is being treated as D.C. politicians push for a new central library. “The idea that the 1972 Mies building cannot be renovated into a first-class 21st-century library is absurd… The city’s idea of selling the Mies building to help pay for its new toy is shameful. There is simply no other way to put it. It is to treat a significant work of architecture as if it were a trifling leftover.”