Kriston Capps over at Grammar.police takes a look at two very different pieces of District architecture, the Italian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue and the Mies van der Rohe-designed Martin Luther King Jr. library downtown. The Italian Embassy has always been a favorite of this DCist, sort of Florentine villa-meets-George Lucas fantasy type of deal, if such an architectural intersection is permitted.

Then there’s the central library, which Capps doesn’t think is well suited to be a library. We see why people hate the downtown library, but there must be some redeeming qualities there. What do you think? Should it be enhanced or torn down?

In related embassy architecture news, we’ve noticed that the Embassy of Cote d’Ivoire still seems that it needs to be finished, after civil wars and other internal strife postponed completion off and on for the past half decade. We thought they had just about wrapped up last year when the latest civil troubles sprouted up. But it looks like there’s still a lot of interior and landscaping work to be done.