Wood was one of the leading colonial revivalist architects of northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., in the early twentieth century, and this building offers a good chance to inspect his work. Although nominally Jeffersonian–Federal Revival, the design, with its thin, attenuated details, has a Regency delicacy. A square central block on the exterior becomes a cube on the interior. Designed as a subscription library, today it is operated by the city as a local history and genealogy library.