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More photographs, drawings, and sketches here High
Resolution Downloads for Publication History:
At its opening
The New York Times predicted that this "handsome new $1,000,000
Park Visitor Center" would "become one of the showplaces of
the National Park System." The Washington Post praised the "quietly
monumental but entirely unsentimental" Neutra design, citing the
Cyclorama Center as one of a set of "exceptionally distinguished
and fearlessly modern" buildings in the national parks, each deserving
of an architectural excellence award. In 1970, the American Institute
of Architects agreed, honoring Mission 66 and the Park Service for the
innovative development of modern facilities "in harmony with the
architectural theme" of each park. In November, 2000, the National Parks Advisory Board refused to grant National Historic Landmark status to the Cyclorama Building, but approved the nominations for three other Mission 66-era visitor centers with identical historic contexts and statements of significance: Dinosaur, Utah; Wright Brothers, North Carolina; and Rocky Mountain, Colorado. Politics? A renewed effort to save the building is underway, led by the Recent Past Preservation Network in cooperation with the Neutra Institute of Survival Through Design, DOCOMOMO, and other allied organizations. This coalition of preservationists is calling upon key public officials, including Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell, to "pardon" the building and provide funds for its restoration. Only public support can save this building now. Sign on here to save the Cyclorama! [by Christine Madrid French for the DOCOMOMO U.S. newsletter; photographs ©Boris Starosta]
Other sites with images: Photo Gallery of Images on the Richard and Dion Neutra Architecture site. Other Documents: Landscape Preservation and Interpretation: Issues of Use, Historical Experience, and Myth at Gettysburg National Military Park. Thesis by Nathan Jefferson Riddle (Columbia University, 1998). Critical analysis of National Park Service interpretive policies at Gettysburg NMP with special coverage of Neutra's Cyclorama Building (ca. 1961) and its place on the battlefield of Gettysburg.
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In
1996, the National Park Service officials announced their intention
to demolish Neutra and Alexander's 1961 modernist Cyclorama Building
at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a premiere first generation "visitor
center" and a stunning example of a master architect's late-life
aspirations. Despite its recent listing on the National Register of
Historic Places for its ""its exceptional historic and architectural
significance," the long-neglected building stands in the way of
National Park Service plans to "restore" the battlefield landscape
and move visitor facilities into a new interpretive center designed
in a "more appropriate" architectural style. 
depicted
in the painting's brilliant scenography and a location deemed most convenient
for the multitudes expected to visit the building during the 100th anniversary
of the Civil War. 
Gettysburg
today is viewed as hallowed ground, a nationalist shrine to both victor
and vanquished, Lincoln's triumphant "Union" and Jefferson
Davis's valiant "Lost Cause." But Neutra rightly interpreted
the battlefield legacy in a much larger sense, one that uniquely applied
Lincoln's vision to a contemporary international political context.
The U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, created in 1957, set the tone
when they emphasized that the upcoming anniversary celebrations be devoted
to "keeping peace through international understanding." Neutra
incorporated this message wholeheartedly in the Cyclorama Building --one
of his last major public commissions. In his hands, the visitor center
became a place of "cultural interchange" rather than a mere
tourist trap. Crowds of up to 30,000 people could be accommodated outside
the building which opened up to reveal an elevated "Rostrum of
the Prophetic Voice." The visionary architect imagined that a procession
of "great statesmen of the Nations…may be even a 'Cold War'
enemy nation" such as India's Jawaharlal Nehru or China's Chou
En-Lai, would present stirring speeches promoting global unanimity at
the yearly anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Where Lincoln spoke
poignantly of the shattered Union between northern and southern states,
Neutra dedicated his latter-day Lincoln Memorial to the cause of international
harmony in a world threatened with atomic annihilation and a nation
consumed with internal issues of civil rights.
political
environments quickly rendered its utopian message ineffective. Today
the Park Service maintains that the building must be removed from the
battlefield. Yet Neutra's intentions for the structure and his humanistic
theories behind its development -for years suppressed and unexplored
-- are just beginning to be understood in the context of his period
and ours. 
