Closed For Repairs?

Donald Trump has announced that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will be closed for "renovations" beginning July 4, 2026.

He promises that it will be better and more beautiful than before.  And Broadway star Patti LuPone, among others, are weighing in on Trump's as-yet unseen plans, with LuPone, below, worried that Trump might tear the building down, and -- 

Wait, what?

Patti LuPone actually wants to see the current Kennedy Center preserved?  Ha ha, that's the funniest thing I've heard all week!

As I have noted before on this blog, the Kennedy center is considered one of the monumentally horrid examples of the the grandiose and pretentious examples of  post-war American architecture, known for its pompous corridors and its oversized theaters, while the performing "arts" events staged there are the sort of middlebrow entertainment that would never be allowed in halls like the Paris Opera House or la Scala.  And there's that really, really ugly - and huge - bust of John F. Kennedy that looks like someone threw mud on a wire model of a human skeleton until the image looked like JFK, at least just a bit.  The surest sign that no architectural standards exist in These States in these days is that people actually find no objection with the design of the current performing arts complex, a building that has sat like a giant warehouse with eaves defiling the eastern bank of the Potomac.

I rarely reproduce entire articles on this blog, but when I do, it's to make a serious point.  And so I do so now, reprinting architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's bashing of the Kennedy Center's architecture in a review published in the New York Times on Tuesday, September 7, 1971, a day before it officially opened to the public.  It is quite trenchant.

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This capital city specializes in ballooning monuments and endless corridors. It uses marble like cotton wool. It is the home of government of, for and by the people, and of taste for the people - the big, the bland and the banal. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, opening officially Wednesday, does not break the rule. The style of the Kennedy Center is Washington superscale, but just a little bit bigger. Albert Speer would have approved.

It has apotheosized the corridor in the 600‐foot‐long, 60‐foot‐high grand foyer (the length of three New York City blockfronts), one of the biggest rooms in the world, into which the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles could he cozily nested. It would be a super-tunnel without its saving Belgian gift of mirrors.

The corridor is “dressed up,” in the words of the architect, Edward Durell Stone, by 18 of the world's biggest crystal chandeliers, with planters and furniture still to come. There is enough red carpet for a total environment.

There are two other flag-hung, polished marble-walled, red‐carpeted, 250‐foot long and 60‐foot high corridors called the Hall of States and the Hall of Nations. They are disquietingly reminiscent of the overscaled vacuity of Soviet palaces of culture. They would be great for drag racing.

The two halls separate the three theaters that are the structure's raison d'être: the Opera House, the Concert Hall and the Eisenhower Theater. The grand foyer is the entrance to them all.

The building itself is a super-bunker, 100 feet high, 630 feet long and 300 feet wide, on the Potomac. One more like this and the city will sink.

Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative, excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally.

Unfortunately, the Kennedy center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called "timelessness" and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad; since there is so much of it.

The center sets still another record—for architectural default. What it has in size, it lacks in distinction. Its character is aggrandized posh. It is an embarrassment to have it stand as a symbol of American artistic, achievement before the nation and the world.

The interiors aim for conventional, comfortable, gargantuan grand luxe. This is gemütlich Speer.

The Opera House, a 2,200‐seat hall with superior sightliness and equipment, looks like one of those passe, red-padded drugstore candy‐valentines.

Its dark red fabric walls are buttoned down with rows of gold knobs and its Austrian crystal lights suggest nothing so much as department store Christmas displays. To this observer, it is singularly depressing.

The 2,375‐seat Concert Hall, its acoustic wood walls painted white, has red seats and carpet and is buttoned down with Norwegian crystal fixtures. This at least is cheerful and suggests 1920s-modern.

Restaurants on the top terrace floor are in expense‐account French by way of Austria, and nearly Scandinavia. They are red.

There are two ways of defending the center's design. One, already popular, is to say that it doesn't really matter and that the only things that count are those badly needed performance halls and how they work.

But nothing justifies wrapping those halls in nearly $70 million of tasteful corn and 17,000 tons of steel -all a conscious design decision - and ignoring it. If you could ignore it, which is hard.

To say that everything else about a landmark structure of this stupefying size is irrelevant is nonsense. The emperor, unfortunately, is wearing clothes. And the world is looking.

The second defense is simply to accept the fact that the center probably represents the norm of American, taste. But it is a fallacy to equate the great middle common denomination of popular taste with the country's actual and potential level of creative achievement.

From this point of view, however, it is almost an interesting building. If Mr. Stone has been aiming for an architecture that all America can love, he has found it This is architectural populism. He has produced a conventional crowd pleaser. It is a genuine people's palace.

People have been pouring in, before the opening, through every available crack, in T‐shirts and sneakers, hot pants and Bermuda shorts, barefoot and bare-bellied, backpacking babies, tracking across the red carpet and under the chandeliers. The pre‐opening charge of elitism because of all that lush decor was rubbish. They are obviously loving it and perfectly at home.

Because it so lacks the true elegance of imagination, it does not put them off at all. They are awed by the scale and admiring of the decoration, which is a safe, familiar blend of theatrical glamour and showroom Castro Convertible.

Stringent economies have made saving simplicities, but the popular style is loud and clear.

For the more architecturally sophisticated, it is hard to admire a failure of vision and art. And it did not have to be it is not easy to commission creative courage in Washington, but it can be done, as proven by the current plans for the National Gallery extension.

It is particularly hard to know that the one creative design for a new kind of experimental theater remains an unfinished shell within the building, lacking funds.

The center was probably wrong from the start. It was conceived as a giant economy three‐in‐one package. If it hasn't cost more than three separate buildings, it certainly hasn't cost less, and it has had formidable construction problems as a result of the "simple" concept.

The three houses have had to be separated and insulated from each other for vibration and sound inside and jets outside, and from other floors and functions.

Suspension and soundproofing have been achieved through incredibly complex and expensive concrete and steelwork that belies the apparent logic of the plan. Structurally, the achievement is considerable, and economically, it is almost a bargain.

The giant steel trusses hidden behind the scenes are far more impressive, than the truly awful, gold‐epoxy‐paint-steel columns that run visibly through the building, which add decorative aluminum fins along the facades.

Environmentally, the center has been severely criticized for its setting and isolation from city life. But many Washingtonians like the idea of driving to a “safe” bastion of culture. Again, it's what people really want.

As completed, the center's plusses include its public amenities—its entrance plaza, riverfront promenade, eating facilities and outdoor terraces with views. And credit as well as sympathy must go to the dedicated and hardworking sponsors who have actually brought three major performance halls to Washington.

May all the performing arts flourish. Because the building is a national tragedy. It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

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In other words, it's the perfect populist palace for a performing "arts" complex where honors go to female rappers who got their start in show business making percussive noises with their mouths on the streets of Newark and clown-faced electric-guitar players whose band name is an accidental acronym for their "musical" style - "Keep it simple, stupid." 

Note that Albert Speer - still alive in 1971 - got mentioned twice in Huxtable's appraisal, and yes, he probably did approve.

So, yes, I say, tear it down, especially in light of the fact that the last person to judge the architectural quality of the Kennedy Center is a theater actress who made a name for herself playing a fascist concubine in a musical written by Western civilization's worst composer.  But at least, Ms. LuPone only played a fascist concubine, which is certainly a whole lot better than being one, one now celebrated in a documentary no one wants to see.

But there's the thing.  As horrid as the Kennedy Center looks from the outside (to be fair, the interior has been renovated in the past, though I hardly see how it could be better now than when it first opened), it's probably better to wait to tear it down and replace it with something that Ada Louise Huxtable would have liked until Trump is out of office, because if he does tear it down, the new performing arts complex will probably look something like this.

In fact, it could end up being worse than this.  How?  I don't let myself think about it.