Site visit: The Kennedy Center in purgatory

I refuse to call it by the new name. Or maybe it’s less about refusal, taking some moral high ground, and more about old habits. Just as the arena in downtown Los Angeles will always be Staples Center (with apologies to crypto.com) and the architecture building at Yale always the A&A (sorry, Paul Rudolph), the Kennedy Center will do just fine.

The lettering on the front of Edward Durell Stone’s massive performing arts complex, of course, tells a different story, as do the shuttle buses that run in a loop between the building and the Foggy Bottom Metro stop, and the web site and some (but not all, given the haste with which the change was made from on high) of the print materials. That story—what led to the arrival of the frightful creature known as The Donald J. Trump and The Robert F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—has mostly to do with the particular vanities of a real estate developer-turned-politician who has added his name to flight-by-night investments and works of architecture alike, from Trump Steaks and Trump University to Trump-branded skyscrapers in New York, Chicago, and, at least until Jared Kushner ran the plan into the ground, Belgrade.

That part of the tale is well known. Less understood, at least beyond the design world, is the architectural history of the Kennedy Center itself, which opened to the public in 1971 to Stone’s design and just seven years ago welcomed a $250 million expansion, called The Reach, by Steven Holl Architects and the landscape architect Edmund Hollander. With the complex sinking fast into what could be a prolonged purgatory, following Trump’s announcement that he plans to close it down in July for two years to carry out “extensive renovations,” I figured now would be a good time to pay a visit myself, to take stock of what the Kennedy Center aimed to be, has been, and, if we can muster up a shred of optimism, might be in a post-Trump future. That announcement, by the way, has drawn a lawsuit from a coalition of preservation groups.