Photo by ElvertBarnes

Famed modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born on this day 126 years ago, but his birthday celebration won’t be worth much locally.

Yesterday the City Paper reported that Mies’ only building in D.C.—the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library—is only slated to get $5.12 million for improvements as part of Mayor Vince Gray’s six-year capital budget rolled out late last week. The amount is but a drop in the bucket of the $60 million Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper asked for.

Why is this a big deal? Because a Urban Land Institute panel recently published a report calling on the city to split the iconic Mies building between the library and another tenant. Without a second tenant, they found, the cost of maintaining the building as is would become prohibitive for the city. Additionally, as Cooper has noted, the building’s 400,000 square feet is more than she says the central library really needs—some 225,000 square feet.

That Cooper got shortchanged means that needed repairs can’t be made on the building and that city officials may be stalling on a decision on what to do with the library. This, the Urban Land Institute report noted, is exactly what the library needs to avoid: “A sense of urgency is important in every aspect of implementation. Not uncommonly, the implementation of big ideas becomes mired in jurisdictional processes, special interests, and unforeseen circumstances,” it said.