On March 16th, the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center capitulated to President Donald Trump’s plan to close the complex this summer for a supposedly essential two-year-long renovation. “I’m not ripping it down,” Trump has said. “I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure. We’re using some of the marble, and some of the marble comes down.” The vagueness is ominous. Trump made similar assurances before ordering the demolition of the East Wing of the White House. No one should be surprised if Edward Durell Stone’s streamlined modernist shoebox changes beyond recognition. When the Kennedy Center opened, in 1971, the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, finding the design a little too redolent of Albert Speer’s fascist monumentalism, described it as “gemütlich Speer.” We may now get echt Speer.