Rockville Memorial Library

The Rockville Memorial Library in Rockville, Maryland, designed by the architectural firm Grimm + Parker, opened in November 2006. While the "Memorial" in the name is for American veterans, the building itself was designed to commemorate something else -- the mapping of the human genome. 

Launched in October 1990 and completed in April 2003, the Human Genome Project (HGP) generated the first sequence of the human genome -- providing information about the human blueprint.

The project, which cost roughly $3 billion, brought together an international consortium of thousands of researchers. In the United States, the researchers were funded by the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. The other major countries in the project were the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and China. 

The work in the United States was done at many different institutions -- the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Washington University in St. Louis, Baylor College of Medicine, the Genome Therapeutics Corporation, Institute for Systems Biology, Stanford University, the University of Washington, the University of Oklahoma, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Department of Energy.  But the key group leading the project was the NHGRI Extramural Research Program at the NIH Twinbrook facility in Rockville, Maryland.

The curving exterior walls of the library are designed to allude to the HGP, but the references become obvious once you step inside.  That's when you see double helices in the floor tile work on the first floor, on the sides of the bookcases, and in the murals showing the history of the city.

The library doesn't do a very job of promoting or even acknowledging their connection to the HGP.   When I started asking questions, the guy manning the main desk directly in front of the massive floor tiling had never noticed the floor and he had to call to ask about it.   I heard him saying "Oh, that was here?" There's no signage -- I had to request Grimm + Parker's "Building Features and Green Design Characteristics" document to see anything in print and even that was pretty sparse.