The Reach at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

摘要

There are few architectural commissions as distinctly American, or as distinctly political, as a national presidential memorial in the nation's capital— especially when that memorial is for a personal hero. Steven Holl, FAIA, vividly remembers watching John F. Kennedy's inauguration when he was in junior high, and for him, the opportunity to design The Reach, a 72,000-square-foot expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.— which serves not only as a dynamic arts institution, but also as a living memorial to the 35th U.S. president-offered "more than a challenge of architecture," he says. "It's a piece of our history." The original Kennedy Center was designed by Edward Durell Stone and opened in 1971. The height of New Formalism's Cold War return to classical form and material, it rejected Modernism's industrial steel and glass in favor of bronze and marble (albeit in the form of panels over a steel frame). But the building's formality is not only found in its materials—the experience is one to match.