We should liberalize our notion of what constitutes an acceptable reuse strategy for grand-dame civic buildings.
Washington D.C. recently announced plans to lease the Carnegie Library, a landmarked Beaux-Arts building built in 1903, to Apple for a new flagship retail store. Many have applauded the proposal, which will finally bring an active and functional use to a historic building that has long been underutilized, and which sits in Mt. Vernon Square, between the city’s convention center and trendy Shaw neighborhood, and the downtown retail and entertainment core. But the prospect of “losing” the former library to a corporate tenant has also been met with criticism—most prominently on this site, where CityLab’s Kriston Capps pleads that a site as grand as the Carnegie “deserves a public use,” ideally as an arts venue, not as a “gadget store.”
Now picture an Apple Store: teeming with customers and employees amid the minimalist furniture and white walls of a polished, landmarked interior. Adaptive reuse of old and historic buildings is increasingly part of the brand’s aesthetic: In Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Geneva, Sydney, and in smaller main street markets around the country, Apple has taken space in old movie houses, theaters, and banks. In New York City, the New York Landmarks Conservancy awarded Apple their Chairman’s Award for the company’s “contribution to preserving, restoring, and repurposing notable historic structures.”
Other commercial tenants similarly crave the authenticity of older buildings. This spring, Nike opened their Moscow flagship in a restored 1903 Art Nouveau building. Luxury hoteliers are snapping up in significant former commercial, civic, and religious buildings; the Hotel Monaco’s D.C. and Baltimore flags are both housed in lightly adapted Beaux-Arts buildings, while the soon-to-open Line Hotel in D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood repurposes the neoclassical First Church of Christ. Another local landmark plagued by decades of poorly executed concepts and disuse, the Romanesque Revival building once known as the Old Post Office, has found a new (if controversial) life as D.C.’s Trump International Hotel.
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Meanwhile, the civic and cultural users who served as the original tenants of these grand buildings have escaped the socio-historical need for classical settings and have decamped for newer or less traditional ones. In greater Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation moved moved their collection from their long-held Italianate building to a new one downtown. In Los Angeles, Eli Broad commissioned Diller Scofidio + Renfro to design his new contemporary art museum adjacent to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. L.A.’s even newer art sensation, The 14th Factory, is housed in a three-acre warehouse cornered by freeways on the edge of downtown. Cape Town’s Museum of Contemporary Art Africa will open this fall in a cluster of former grain silos; London’s iconic Tate Modern inhabits the former Bankside Power Station. Though never conceived for cultural uses, these buildings have been brought to life for a new generation by them.