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CURRENT GETTYSBURG NEWS IN THE MEDIA
Two major publications recently covered the preservation fight to save
Neutra and Alexander's Cyclorama Building (1958-61) at Gettysburg National
Military Park. The effort to save this structure, begun in 1998, is
still active. A renewed campaign to save the building is underway, led
by the Recent Past Preservation Network (www.recentpast.org) in cooperation
with the Neutra Institute of Survival Through Design, DOCOMOMO U.S.,
the Society of Architectural Historians, and other allied organizations.
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine featured the building in an article
by Mark Rozzo entitled: "Who Chooses History? - The National Park Service
Has Decided That L.A. Architect Richard Neutra's Landmark Cyclorama
Center--Which Has Stood at the Gettysburg Battlefield for More Than
40 Years--Now Detracts From the Historic Nature of the Site. Just Months
Before Its Possible Closing, a Bigger Question Remains: Who Chooses
History?" In the article, superintendent of Gettysburg NMP John Latschar
refers to "dumb stuff going on here" in reference to the building design
and disparages Neutra's ideas of creating "a monument to Lincoln and
freedom and all that stuff." *Text of this article is inserted below
or you can email me for more information. And Tony Illia of Architectural
Record covered the ongoing controversy in a July 2 piece entitled: "Neutra's
Cyclorama Center in Gettysburg Facing Demolition" available online at
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/040702neutra.asp
Latest news: An appeal for National Historic Landmark status, submitted
by the Society of Architectural Historians, was denied by Fran Mainella,
director of the National Park Service despite its original endorsement
by the Park Service Landmarks Committee. Three similar Park Service
visitor centers - all constructed under the mid-century Mission 66 building
program -- were awarded NHL status in 2000. Pardon Neutra's Cyclorama!
You can join the growing coalition of Cyclorama preservationists by
urging key officials to immediately grant a demolition pardon to Richard
Neutra's Cyclorama at Gettysburg and provide funds for its restoration.
Supporters of preservation can sign an on-line petition for preservation
at: http://www.petitiononline.com/neutra61/petition.html
Background: Photographs, drawings, historic information, and preservation
updates are available at: http://www.mission66.com/cyclorama
In the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the National Park
Service commissioned a leading modernist architect - Richard Neutra
- to design a visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park. Neutra
shirked convention and envisioned the building as a "place of cultural
interchange" a mid-century memorial to Lincoln that celebrated American
values in a global context. The New York Times praised the building
as an example of the federal government's new architectural identity.
Yet Neutra's modernist statement, set upon a premiere historic site,
failed to resonate with the public. By the 1970s, the Park Service distanced
itself from Neutra's design and his utopian ideologies. The visitor
center was declared an "intrusion" on the landscape, an error in judgment
that must be erased to restore the battlefield to its "original condition."
The National Park Service, supported by the National Trust for Historic
Preservation and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, fully
intends to destroy the Cyclorama Building without considering re-use
or preservation alternatives and despite the protestations of architects,
preservation professionals, and noted historians.
The demolition is a key component of a controversial and misguided
private redevelopment plan to construct a massive new visitor-oriented
structure over a mile away, complete with expansive parking lots, on
previously undisturbed battlefield land within the Park Service boundaries.
The national significance of the Cyclorama Building is recognized by
leading organizations--including the National Register of Historic Places,
the Society of Architectural Historians, and the American Institute
of Architects Historic Resources Committee. Letters of support from
prominent architects such as Sir Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, and Robert
A.M. Stern are all online at: http://www.mission66.com/cyclorama/letters/index.html
The actions of the Department of the Interior and the National Park
Service follow a disturbing pattern of disregard for public input on
this controversial matter. Many people feel that Interior cannot objectively
review the historical and cultural significance of the Cyclorama Building
as long as it stands in the way of long-settled redevelopment plans
at Gettysburg. Please contact me (madridfrench@mission66.com) or Dion
Neutra (dion@neutra.org) if you are interested in doing more to save the
Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg. As Dion said in the following article
""It's never over, until it's over."
(Re-print from the LA Times.)
Who Chooses History?
"The National Park Service Has Decided That L.A. Architect Richard
Neutra's Landmark Cyclorama Center--Which Has Stood at the Gettysburg
Battlefield for More Than 40 Years--Now Detracts From the Historic Nature
of the Site. Just Months Before Its Possible Closing, a Bigger Question
Remains: Who Chooses History?" By Mark Rozzo.
Mark Rozzo is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a
regular contributor to The Times' Book Review.
June 27, 2004. Los Angeles Sunday Magazine. Sitting at the dining-room
table of his Silver Lake home, 2,300 miles from the hallowed battlefield
where part of his father's legacy is under siege, Los Angeles architect
Dion Neutra, still sprightly at 77, allows his voice to escalate in
mild exasperation. "There should be a national will to save these buildings,"
he says. "It shouldn't have to be a one-man crusade."
Silence-punctuated by birdsong-fills the home he helped build with
his famous father, the late Richard Neutra, in 1950. The understated
dwelling, with its sleek lines and soothing reflecting pool, is known
in the ever-expanding Neutra literature as the Reunion House, a modernist
oasis in the big city and the keystone of a grouping of lovingly preserved
Neutra homes on, appropriately enough, Neutra Place.
Other Neutra buildings haven't been so lucky. "Lost Neutras," Dion
calls them, as if they were actual family members, including the stunning
curvilinear Northridge estate his dad designed for director Josef von
Sternberg in the 1930s, leveled in 1971 to make way for condos; or the
Fine Arts Building at Cal State Northridge, demolished in 1997 because
of earthquake damage; or, more recently and shocking, the Maslon House
in Rancho Mirage, bought in February 2002 and summarily razed by the
owner. The teardown provoked widespread outrage, coast-to-coast newspaper
coverage and an impassioned appeal from the National Trust for Historic
Preservation, which warned that such disregard for "museum-quality"
buildings has, in our McMansion-happy age, become an epidemic.
Neutra spends much of his time trying to protect the legacy of his
father, who died in 1970 and was declared by the director of the Museum
of Modern Art in New York to be second only to architect Frank Lloyd
Wright in terms of international reputation. At least six Neutra structures
are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and others are
tagged as Los Angeles historical cultural monuments, or on the rolls
of preservation groups from Pennsylvania to Texas.
Yet his biggest preservation battle is being fought far from California,
in Gettysburg, Pa., against an unlikely foe: the National Park Service.
The Cyclorama Center at the Gettysburg National Military Park, the shrine-like
battlefield visited by nearly 2 million tourists a year, is perhaps
Richard Neutra's greatest public commission and the finest example of
his work east of the Mississippi. Yet it's slated for demolition in
early 2007.
Is the Park Service, as some critics suggest, railroading the Cyclorama
out of existence? Is there anything the fabled architect's son can do
to save it from becoming yet another lost Neutra?
The Cyclorama Center takes its name from the 360-degree panoramic painting,
called "The Battle of Gettysburg," that it houses. Until a few years
ago, hardly anyone gave the building much thought. True, when it was
built in 1962, a park historian objected to its siting as the battlefield's
official visitor center at Ziegler's Grove on Cemetery Hill. Near there,
Union forces repulsed Confederate Gen. George Pickett's forces during
the climax of the bloodiest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.
And, in 1977, the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
recommended that, on second thought, perhaps the modern facility should
be relocated to a less central site. But for the majority of Gettysburg's
7,490 residents and carloads of pilgrims, the curiously futuristic facility
was taken for granted as a modern contribution to a commemorative landscape
famous for its well-traveled macadam lanes, its erector-set observation
towers and its granite and marble monuments. Most people had no clue
that the Cyclorama Center was designed by Richard Neutra, or knew anything
about the Viennese-born architect whose luminous structures have been
called gems of 20th century American architecture.
But since the late 1990s, when redevelopment plans were hatched and
Cyclorama supporters began pushing for landmark status to protect the
building, the center has been the focal point of a skirmish pitting
preservationists against one another in a debate about what is "historic."
Nestled in its leafy grove like a proud, if weather-beaten, relic of
the Jet Age, Neutra's Cyclorama has become the prime target of a campaign
to restore Cemetery Hill and much of the battlefield to its 1863 appearance.
At the same time, the Cyclorama Center has become the poster child of
a nascent movement to save notable buildings of the recent past from
premature destruction.
As Dion Neutra admits, saving the Cyclorama Center is a long shot.
The not-so-affectionate nicknames that detractors occasionally tossed
around have begun to stick: "the gas tank" and "Starship Enterprise."
The park's current superintendent, who vows to reduce the 35,271-square-foot
structure to rubble, calls it "the world's largest air filter," because
of an air duct system located behind the painting.
"There's some really just dumb stuff going on here," Supt. John Latschar
said during a tour of the aging facility.
With his graying beard and wide-brimmed ranger's hat, Latschar has
the commanding aura of a mud-spattered brigadier general. "Only a Southern
California architect would put on a flat roof to protect a work of art
in Pennsylvania [a region of high rain and snowfall]," he said, ticking
off the building's various shortcomings. The enormous mechanized sliding-glass
doors don't work. The spiraling indoor ramp leading to the painting
is too steep and outdated to comply with current handicap codes. The
Park Service let the high-maintenance reflecting pools dry up eons ago.
The stainless-steel, cage-like rostrum, designed for visiting speakers
from around the world, was used only once, on dedication day, Nov. 19,
1962 (the 99th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address), because
the Sons of Union Veterans preferred to make their annual observances
at Gettysburg National Cemetery across the street where Lincoln delivered
his speech. And hairline fractures in the concrete rotunda, the building's
salient feature, cause moisture to be sucked inside, creating unmanageable
fluctuations in humidity and endangering the very thing the building
is intended to protect: the eye-popping 359-by-27-foot wraparound cyclorama
of Pickett's Charge, executed by French journeyman painter Paul Philippoteaux
in 1884 and declared a National Historic Object in 1944. (Think Victorian
IMAX.)
During the tour, scaffolds covered water-stained and flaking portions
of the painting, which once wowed Victorian audiences as a Barnumesque
midway attraction and is said to have caused veterans to weep with its
apocalyptic depiction of exploding caissons and dying men. A crew was
hard at work in the opening stages of preserving the massive canvas-the
largest undertaking of its kind in U.S. history. Panel by panel, the
unabashedly triumphant work will be meticulously repaired. Plans call
for the panorama to be reinstalled nearby in a mammoth $68.3-million
complex planned for a nearly 100-acre tract of mostly pristine ground
deemed by developer Robert A. Kinsley as "less hallowed" than Ziegler's
Grove.
In Dion Neutra's effort to save his father's building, the start of
this ambitious restoration is akin to the shots fired on Ft. Sumter-the
juncture at which a long-simmering war of opinions turns hot. Or perhaps
it's Vicksburg, when the struggle becomes a lost cause. At any rate,
the Cyclorama Center's countdown clock is ticking loudly. The Park Service
entered into a cooperative development agreement with Kinsley's private
Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation in June 2000. The
painting restoration is moving into its most intense phase, and the
Cyclorama's gallery could be boarded up for good as early as March,
when groundbreaking for the updated facility is scheduled to begin.
Its gallery would make the Cyclorama Center redundant.
Latschar, a Vietnam Veteran with a doctorate in American history, is
a shrewd and articulate campaigner for the new plan, which he helped
write, and for the removal of the Cyclorama Center. Standing outside
the building, which seems to hover like a spectral apparition in Ziegler's
Grove, the superintendent brought his argument back to what he considers
the structure's dubious provenance: Mission 66, an expansive Eisenhower
Administration initiative to improve the infrastructure in America's
national parks after World War II. Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch in St.
Louis was completed with Mission 66 dollars, as were more than 100 other
visitor centers. Latschar is not a fan of what he considers these often
obtrusive structures. "I hope the Park Service is never again faced
with a program of that magnitude because the architects ran amok," he
said.
But for architectural historian Christine Madrid French, president
of the international nonprofit Recent Past Preservation Network, Mission
66 was a heroic program, and the Cyclorama was one of its flagships.
French, a Park Service veteran, contends that purposeful neglect, not
design flaws, are the cause of the Cyclorama's problems. "You don't
care about it, so why spend extra money on it? Then it's falling apart,
and the party that wants to demolish it points out all the deficiencies."
Latschar concedes that little money has been invested in the Cyclorama.
A 1996 Park Service study estimated that at least $11 million would
be needed to rehab the structure, which cost $959,603 to build in 1962.
One reason for the decay, Latschar suggested, is that the park administration
never embraced Richard Neutra's vision in the first place. "Mr. Neutra
had the idea that this would be his monument to Lincoln and freedom
and all that stuff," he said. "The problem is, he never listened to
his clients, because we did not want a monument, we wanted a functional
building. And, as a result, we got neither."
Dion Neutra counters that, as with all Neutra projects, "interaction
was extremely high. Down to the last stone on the battlefield, everything
was discussed. Mr. Latschar wasn't present at the time." The Neutra
firm, he adds, received the blessing of the Park Service for its design
and was never contacted about maintenance or design problems once the
building was dedicated.
Far from bringing a grandiose vision to Ziegler's Grove, Neutra turned
in a low-key, unsentimental structure-of concrete, steel and Pennsylvania
sandstone-designed not only to display Philippoteaux's panorama near
the site of the action it depicts, but intended as an enduring monument
to the Gettysburg Address. "Lincoln was not a victor-speechmaker," Richard
Neutra wrote. "He was a prophet, and his grand text still resounds."
Like Lincoln's famous speech, the Abraham Lincoln Shrine of the Nation
(as Neutra subtitled the Cyclorama) did not attempt to add to or detract
from what those brave soldiers did at Gettysburg.
French, the architectural historian who has been called the "Saint
of Parkitecture," has helped Dion Neutra generate more than 1,100 letters
of support for the Cyclorama. L.A. architect and Walt Disney Concert
Hall creator Frank Gehry, for example, wrote that Neutra's building
"reflects the highest ideals of his own time, and deserves the highest
appreciation of ours." And the American Institute of Architects has
described the Cyclorama as "one of the most important buildings constructed
by the [Park Service] during the 20th century."
"It's a tragedy," Neutra says, considering the potential fate of the
Cyclorama and other Neutra masterworks already lost to the wrecking
ball, threatened by development, sullied by neglect, brought low by
mud, consumed by fire (as the Goodman House in San Bernardino was last
October), or morphed into Frankenstein disarray through remodeling.
"They take years to mature," he says with a rueful laugh, "and that's
when we tear them down."
But for many historians, the Cyclorama is simply a misplaced modern
artifact. "It is sad to lose a major architect's work," Gabor Boritt,
a Lincoln scholar and director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg
College, said over lunch at his handsome stone farmhouse, a field hospital
during the Gettysburg battle. "The Cyclorama is beautiful, but the primary
goal here is to display history. We're talking about taking a building
and killing it. I understand that it's bad. But this place deserves
to be as close to the reality of history as we can make it."
The Hungarian-born professor speaks eloquently of Gettysburg as "sacred
ground." It's where an estimated 51,000 Americans were killed, wounded
or captured during the three-day battle that ended July 3, 1863. What
Boritt calls "the central moment of American history" has, he says,
an inarguable right-of-way over a Mission 66 building, and it's altogether
fitting that Ziegler's Grove be remodeled to Civil War-era specifications.
Battlefield restoration-the practice of re-creating period landscapes-has
gained momentum as Civil War preservation has gained momentum, fighting
to keep Wal-Marts and gated communities away from threatened battlefields.
Meanwhile, for many Americans, the Civil War has evolved from history
to leisure pursuit. Reenactors, whose activities were frowned on when
the Cyclorama was built, now swarm the nation's military parks in pursuit
of what they call a "period rush." They're a core battlefield constituency,
and a modern building in their simulated 19th century universe is a
buzz kill.
But is it so hard to envision 1863 at today's Ziegler's Grove? And,
if so, is it the Cyclorama's fault? The structure is virtually invisible
when the surrounding red oaks are in leaf. Its observation terrace-where
pilgrims can take in a one-of-a-kind view of the field of Pickett's
Charge-rises barely 20 feet off the ground. What about those other monuments,
and all those idling SUVs? What about the General Pickett's All-U-Can-Eat
Buffet Restaurant and the KFC over on adjacent Steinwehr Avenue?
Dion Neutra has no quibble with sacred ground, but, he says, "I call
it revisionist when you smooth things over and pretend that that's what
Ziegler's Grove always looked like-as if this building never existed."
Can we second-guess, Neutra asks, how our forebears chose to memorialize
American history? After all, the veterans themselves transformed a scene
of carnage into a genteel memorial park, and the greater Ziegler's Grove
area has had its own rather full history since the battle, having hosted
an observation tower, a park road, an auto dump and, as Neutra likes
to point out, millions of Cyclorama visitors. Seen in this light, the
Cyclorama isn't so much a desecration as a marked improvement.
Historian Boritt sits on the board of the Gettysburg National Battlefield
Museum Foundation. It's the private wing of the private-public partnership
that plans to build the new 139,000-square-foot museum and visitor-center
complex designed to resemble a high-tech Pennsylvania Dutch farm, complete
with two theaters, snack bar and a bookstore and a museum store, storage
for the park's 38,000 artifacts and 700,000-piece archive, and an updated
Cyclorama gallery, in which the restored painting will be hung according
to the latest technology.
The architects tapped for the new Gettysburg visitor center also designed
Celebration, Disney's ersatz picket-fence community in Florida. In contrast
to the urbane Cyclorama, the foundation's complex will be a sunny rebuke
to Richard Neutra's credo that "the best of the old cannot be truly
imitated."
The park's current museum (next to the Cyclorama Center and also tagged
for demolition) is a homespun affair, featuring the semifamous Electric
Map, a twinkling midcentury curiosity that appeals more to connoisseurs
of roadside Americana than Civil War buffs or even today's "Shrek"-saturated
kids. (By the way, those birds you hear aren't part of the canned narration,
they're starlings, nesting in the acoustic-tiled ceiling.) Perusing
the museum's smorgasbord of swords, knapsacks and Springfield rifles
(variously threatened by rust and "red rot" leather damage from poor
climate control), you'd barely know slavery existed in the United States.
"We need something here like the Holocaust Museum," Boritt argues. "We
need something that's going to grab people."
The plan, so far, has certainly grabbed people, but not always because
of the tantalizing interpretive opportunities it presents. When the
public-private development plan first surfaced in the late 1990s, the
initiative sparked protests from Gettysburg's borough council and "rubber-tomahawk"
merchants, who feared losing tourist dollars to the proposed behemoth.
Its budget was initially set at $39 million, but it eventually ballooned
to $95 million, including, among other things, the cost of the new visitor
center, digitizing the museum's collection and a maintenance endowment.
The strong whiff of commercialism (Kinsley, chairman of the Gettysburg
foundation, is a developer from nearby York, Pa.) also alarmed Civil
War groups, provoking the national chairman of the Civil War Round Table
Associates to denounce the plan as a scheme "to rape the landscape of
America's premier Civil War battlefield."
Yet according to Latschar, who insists the venture will not generate
a dime in profit for Kinsley, "wiser heads prevailed," and the public-private
development plan was finalized in 2000. Most Civil War preservationists
patched things up with the foundation, satisfied that hallowed ground-at
least Ziegler's Grove, home of the Cyclorama-would be "restored." Even
so, you can still hear grumblings that the opposition wasn't so much
won over as outflanked. "There's a saying in Gettysburg," a local merchant
said recently: " 'The Park Service is going to do whatever the Park
Service wants to do-period.' "
French, Dion Neutra's able lieutenant, traveled to Gettysburg to participate
in public meetings, where she encountered similar intransigence, as
well as considerable regional bias: "I talked to Park Service people
who said, 'Well, you know, Neutra was a European. But worse, he was
from California.' "
"They are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who like cutesy vernacular
style," Neutra adds.
The skirmish over the Cyclorama Center's landmark status involved a
tangle of federal and Park Service agencies. In late 1998, the Cyclorama
was deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, but
the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation subsequently ruled
that it "must yield" to battlefield restoration-a ruling that effectively
derailed the plan to place it on the National Register. In December
1999, the Park Service System Advisory Board's Landmarks Committee endorsed
the Cyclorama's nomination for landmark status, but that endorsement
was short-lived. It was overruled two days later by the full advisory
board. Land for the new complex, meanwhile, was sold to the foundation
before the Cyclorama's landmark status was clarified. Neutra and French,
it seemed, might as well have been trying to slow Sherman's march. "Whatever
we tried to do," says Neutra, who traveled to Gettysburg only to be
stonewalled by the administration there, "it was like gnats biting at
an elephant."
Given the overwhelming forces deployed against him, why doesn't Dion
Neutra just put out a white flag and move on?
For starters, the Gettysburg foundation has "identified" only $54 million
of the $75 million it intends to raise before groundbreaking can begin.
And the date of that groundbreaking was recently pushed back from fall
2004 to March. Modernist preservation associations, meanwhile, are busy
cultivating appreciation for the not-so-old treasures in our backyards,
and the cachet-not to mention asking prices-of vintage Neutras continues
to escalate. French, for her part, maintains that the Cyclorama Center
has life left in it as, say, a museum or archive. "I never think of
a preservation fight as a lost cause," she says, "because if the building
is still standing, there's always a chance."
What about picking up the Cyclorama and moving it? Sounds far-fetched,
but the Maxwell House in Los Angeles, a Neutra unwittingly bought for
a teardown, may eventually be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. "If
the folks in L.A. feel strongly about it," Boritt said, "I'll make a
contribution to fit into my means. To save the building someplace else."
Waiting at the Reunion House for the latest dispatch from Gettysburg,
Dion Neutra fires off another round of e-mails and faxes-to friends,
preservationists, even the White House. He'd prefer to see the Cyclorama
stay right where it is. "It's never over," he says, "until it's over."
*****
Click here to read Dion's answer to
this article.
For further information, contact Chris Madrid French www.recentpast.org
www.mission66.com
( 434)-293-2872
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