In 2012, when the trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington were selecting an architect to expand the facility, they knew they had an unusual challenge. The problem was not that the imposing structure, completed in 1971 by Edward Durell Stone, was so good that any change could damage its aesthetic. On the contrary, it has long been considered an overblown example of monumental modernism in its dated, classicizing symmetry and white marble cladding. Ada Louise Huxtable’s epigrammatic conclusion to her New York Times critique seemed to be its epitaph: “It is a cross between a concrete candy box and marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.”
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