[The following is a transcript of a phone interview with Dale Wurmser, Vice President of Nomenclature Integration at a signage-and-wayfinding consultancy currently holding the federal contract for the Kennedy Center Trump renaming. Lightly edited for length, and for the four uninterrupted minutes he spent describing a font.]
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FRIED OCEAN: The announcement says the Kennedy Center will be closed for two years. Two years is a long time for a sign.
DALE WURMSER: Right, and that’s the misunderstanding, and I want to get ahead of it, because we’ve been getting angry voicemails from people who think we’re hanging letters on a wall. We are not hanging letters on a wall. The name is not going on the building. The building is going inside the name.
FO: Inside it.
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WURMSER: Inside it. The letters are the structure now. The building is the contents. Think of a gift bag. Nobody wraps a gift bag.
FO: So you’re taking apart a national performing arts center and reassembling it inside letterforms.
WURMSER: We’re re-seating it. Nothing is taken apart in a way that couldn’t be put back, probably. Year one is fabrication — we cast the letters first, on site, and they go up hollow. Year two is what we call the insertion phase, where the venues get relocated into their assigned characters. The Concert Hall goes into the bowl of the lowercase U. Beautiful fit. Acoustically it’s actually an improvement, because a bowl is a bowl.
“The apostrophe is load-bearing”
FO: The headline says the entire building fits inside the name. Does it? Actually?
WURMSER: At ninety-four percent, yes.
FO: What happens to the other six percent?
WURMSER: The Opera House is being reduced twelve percent to make its target enclosure. Which sounds dramatic, but the audience will simply be slightly smaller. Not fewer. Smaller. We’re not cutting seats, we’re compressing the people in them. Our AI modeling firm ran four hundred thousand simulations and only about nine percent of attendees experience what the deck calls “unpleasant torso outcomes.”
FO: You had AI do this.
WURMSER: We had AI do the kerning. That was the single biggest line item. Four hundred thousand iterations of letter spacing, running around the clock for eleven weeks, burning enough electricity to run a mid-sized regional airport. And it landed — I want to be honest here, because I respect the craft — it landed on exactly the same kerning a guy named Ron did by hand on graph paper in 1974. Identical. To the millimeter.
FO: So you paid for nothing.
WURMSER: We paid for confidence.
FO: Talk me through the possessive. The name has an apostrophe-S in the project title.
WURMSER: The apostrophe is load-bearing. I cannot stress that enough. Every piece of HVAC for the entire complex now runs through the apostrophe. It is, structurally, the most important punctuation mark in North America. If a bird gets into the apostrophe, three theaters go to seventy-eight degrees and stay there.
FO: And the S?
WURMSER: Green rooms, catering, and the wellness suite. There’s an infrared sauna in the upper curve and a cold plunge in the lower curve, because the donor committee felt strongly that a modern arts institution should offer recovery. There is now a place inside the letter S where a man can pay eighty dollars to shiver.
The descender problem, solved
FO: Is there anything about this project you’re genuinely proud of?
WURMSER: The P. Absolutely the P. Look, in forty-one years of signage, a descender is dead weight. It’s the part of the letter that hangs below the line and does nothing for anybody. Costs money, catches ice, pigeons live in it. We put the entire parking garage in the descender of the P. Eleven hundred spaces. I’ve been waiting my whole career to find a use for a descender and I found it on a federal contract.
FO: Where’s the lobby?
WURMSER: Crossbar of the T. Coat check is in the left serif. Restrooms are in the right serif, which is smaller, so we made a decision there and we’re going to hear about it. Then the donor wall — and this was very sensitive — the donor wall got relocated into a period. All of it. Every name that gave over two hundred grand, engraved inside one punctuation mark the size of a hot tub, in a font so small you have to be invited in individually to read your own name. The donors love it. It’s the most exclusive thing we’ve ever built. Three of them cried.
FO: Who’s actually doing the work?
WURMSER: About nine hundred installers, sourced through a platform. They pick up shifts on an app, they get rated on a five-star system by a supervisor who is also an app, and they’re on a corporate wellness plan that tracks their steps and gives them a two-dollar coffee credit at ten thousand. Which they hit before lunch, because they’re inside a letter.
FO: Bathrooms for them?
WURMSER: Right serif. When it’s ready. Currently they walk to a gas station.
FO: Did anyone raise the possibility of just making the name smaller?
WURMSER: Someone did, at the kickoff, and I remember it clearly because the room went very quiet and then we moved to the next slide. But I’ll answer it seriously: a smaller name is a different project. You’re describing a project where the building is the point.
FO: During the two years, can the public see the building at all?
WURMSER: The building is interior now. That’s not a limitation, that’s the design. You’ll see the name from the highway, from planes, from parts of Maryland. The Nutcracker will run out of a hallway inside the U, seventy seats, folding chairs, and I’ll tell you what, people are going to talk about that Nutcracker for the rest of their lives.
FO: Last thing. What happens in forty years when somebody else wants their name on it?
WURMSER: Then it goes inside theirs. Name inside a name inside a name, like those Russian dolls, each one bigger. We call it nesting. Honestly, it’s the future of the arts, and the beautiful part is you never have to touch the original building again. It’s in there. It’s fine. Nobody needs to open it.