Before I begin, I want to say that the people demanding immediate name removal from federal buildings have a point. Signage matters. That said, I have been sitting with the complex dynamics of architectural nomenclature for several weeks now, and I believe we are missing the deeper conversation about what I call "institutional name fatigue syndrome."

The recent judicial decision to remove presidential naming from the Kennedy Center reveals a sophisticated understanding of what buildings actually need from us. And yet. We are not asking the harder questions about whether our cultural institutions are suffering from what researchers at Georgetown's Center for Architectural Psychology (a program I briefly audited in 2018) call "nomenclatural whiplash disorder." According to their preliminary findings from a study of 23 respondents, buildings that undergo frequent name changes show decreased structural confidence and impaired patron navigation abilities.

This is where those who prefer the comfort of certainty will stop reading, but the readers who are brave enough to find this column challenging understand that true empathetic governance requires acknowledging that both the name-removers and the name-keepers are practicing forms of empathetic absolutism. I have made the personal sacrifice of visiting three different Kennedy Centers across my various relocations (including during my second divorce, when I was staying in a hotel near Lincoln Center and got confused), and I can tell you that institutional identity confusion is real. And yet. We continue to treat building names as if they are permanent, rather than recognizing them as living documents of our collective architectural consciousness.

The real issue is not whether names should be removed or preserved, but whether we have developed what I call "the nomenclatural compassion gap" - our inability to understand that buildings themselves are stakeholders in these decisions. I have sat with this discomfort for several days, watching my office succulent (the one that survived my third divorce) struggle with the label I gave it last month, and I realize we are asking our cultural institutions to bear the weight of political empathetic absolutism without offering them the therapeutic nomenclatural support they deserve.

The real question is whether we still know how to talk to each other.