Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Certainly not Kwong Von Glinow (KVG), the Chicago practice tasked with the recent redesign of the 21,400-square-foot John M. Flaxman Library at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Located in the Loop, SAIC occupies parts of 13 buildings. “It is not a typical campus,” explains KVG principal Lap Chi Kwong. “It is a city school, with most of its spaces stacked in buildings.” With the goal of improving the library’s Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection on the fifth floor of the Sharp Building, a Holabird & Roche landmark erected in 1902, the SAIC issued a request for proposals. KVG, a 2022 Design Vanguard, responded with a two-story scheme that revamped the meandering layout of the special collection on the fifth floor and linked it to the circulating main collection upstairs. This brilliant refreshment of tired space didn’t just unify two floors. It also created a learning center that draws students from across artistic disciplines—a rarity on a campus so dispersed.