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"When it opened in 1962, the Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania was deemed absolutely cutting edge. Created by modernist architect Richard Neutra and his business partner, Robert Alexander, it was a startling addition to the historic site, a club-shaped composition of glass, steel, and concrete dominated by a three-story cylinder. (The cylinder housed a 360-degree cyclorama painting by the French artist Paul Philippoteaux of the climactic 1863 Confederate attack on Union forces.) Upon completion The Washington Post called Neutra's structure \"quietly monumental but entirely unsentimental,\" while The New York Times noted that its interactive displays would provide \"a heightened sense of the fateful events that occurred during the battle that turned the tide of the Civil War.\"\n\nPinterestFacebookThe architect's 1958 rendering for the futuristic structure. Rendering: Richard Neutra, courtesy of the National Parks Service\n\nTimes change. In 1999 the National Park Service and the Gettysburg Foundation deemed the low, lean work contextually inappropriate. The building, long ago nicknamed Starship Enterprise, had been purposefully situated at the battlefield on a hallowed spot called North Cemetery Ridge; Neutra (1892\u20131970) intended it to serve as a bridge between past and present, placing visitors squarely within the Civil War's bloodiest conflict as well as near the site where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Modern-day government officials, however, decided to reduce the intrusions of later eras, however well meant, in order to restore the landscape to its bucolic, 1860s state. Preservationists, among them Neutra's architect son Dion Neutra, were outraged, but in 2009, the complex's two-story office-and-museum wing was bulldozed. In February, the last remaining section\u2014the 35,271-square-foot Cyclorama Center\u2014will come tumbling down, despite a previous stay of demolition, and despite Richard Neutra's own bold declaration, uttered back in 1959: \"This building will last forever.\"\n\nPinterestFacebookThe midcentury-modern interior of the soon-to-be-demolished Cyclorama Center. Photo: Jack Boucher, courtesy of the National Park Service\n\n The loss of Neutra's only public building east of the Mississippi River, though a tragedy for admirers of modernism, will be atmosphere's gain. Once the Cyclorama Center has been removed, the 6,000-plus-acre park will look much as it did in the summer of 1863, shortly before more than 51,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed in a three-day military action. As a recent park-service analysis pointed out, \"[Demolition] best meets the park objectives of protecting and preserving cultural and natural resources by rehabilitating the landscape. . . . and its veteran-designed commemoration.\"\n\nPinterestFacebookFrench artist Paul Philippoteaux's cyclorama depicting Pickett's Charge in its new home, a Cooper, Robertson &amp;amp; Partners-designed visitor center. Photo courtesy of the Gettysburg Visitors Bureau\n\nThe evocative artifacts that Neutra and Alexander's building once contained are now displayed in a 139,000-square-foot museum and visitor center that was completed in 2008 near the park's entrance. Conceived by Manhattan architects Cooper, Robertson &amp;amp; Partners to resemble a 19th-century farm\u2014including an octagonal, red-painted barn displaying Philippoteaux's cyclorama painting\u2014the new complex is far from modern in looks, though it is modern minded. It is the only the fourth museum in the United States to be granted LEED Gold certification from the U. S. Green Building Council."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/richard-neutra-cyclorama-gettysburg-national-military-park>