For more than a decade, preservationists have been battling in Gettysburg, trying to save the Cyclorama Center, a solemn yet informal concrete and fieldstone building designed by the great modernist Richard Neutra and completed in 1961.
The building was designed to house Paul Phillippoteaux's 1884 painting “The High Tide of the Confederacy,” a 360-degree view of the battlefield on July 3, 1863. Robert E. Lee's Confederates made a last desperate bid to storm the Union's bastion on Cemetery Ridge. The painting is a wonder: 377 feet long by 42 feet high, with a weight of 12.5 tons. The idea was to show visitors this stirring, and generally accurate, view of the battle, and then let them emerge into the very spot that is the vantage point for the cyclorama. It was drive-in history at its best, but that’s not how we do such things any more.
Today, the building stands derelict and overgrown, behind chain link fences and signs that declare it is permanently closed. It remains standing until a lawsuit seeking its preservation is resolved.
Our national parks have more visitors than ever before, and these visitors bring expectations shaped by theme parks that encourage visitors to view their visit as a series of thrill rides. Gettysburg will never be a ride; it’s a pilgrimage site, sad and beautiful. The world, said Abraham Lincoln, “can never forget what they did here.” But understanding what they did here, and why, takes effort.
Neutra’s Cyclorama Center came out of a program called Mission 66, a decade-long effort that began in the mid-1950s. It aimed to upgrade the visitors’ experience at National Park Service sites in time for the agency’s fiftieth anniversary in 1966. Mission 66 grew out of a mid-century moment, one that also produced the Interstate Highway System and Holiday Inns. It embodied car culture at a moment when it seemed benign, and even progressive. Out of this, too, came a recognizable aesthetic for the Park Service — a clean, though woodsy modernism that pervaded its buildings, graphics, and clear, user-friendly maps. It embodied confidence, openness, and convenience.
Like nearly all the Mission 66 buildings, the Cyclorama Center had some practical problems involving access and maintenance —and it’s just too small for modern purposes. But its main problem is its pivotal location on Cemetery Ridge.
Neutra was aware of the significance of his site, and he tucked the building, as well as he could — given the great cylindrical room that was its centerpiece — under the brow of the ridge. Neutra’s ambitions for it were perhaps too great; he kept referring to it as his Lincoln Memorial, and it included a wall that would swing open revealing a rostrum where listeners indoors and outdoors could hear new Gettysburg addresses. But the building is elegant and understated.
Now, the painting has a new home, only two thirds of a mile away, but on one of those rare sites in the Gettysburg area where nothing of significance happened in 1863. The new building, by Cooper, Robertson & Partners of New York, is also, by necessity, dominated by the cylinder that holds the cyclorama, but it treats this volume as a red polygonal barn at the center of a farm-like cluster of sheds and wings. It all adds up to a sprawling 139,000 square feet of museum exhibits, lobby and orientation space, as well as cafeteria and bookstore. While it really doesn’t look like local farm buildings, it does not look out of place. If you look closely, it looks a little bit cheap, but its chief design goal seems not to draw any attention to itself.
Its entrance hall is as large as Neutra’s whole building, but you need only spend a few minutes in the building to realize that it is exactly what today’s tourists expect. Indeed, there is a danger that the building is so engaging — so filled with intriguing films, lively graphics, interactive displays, and evocative artifacts — that some might be tempted to skip the battlefield itself. (One could argue though that Neutra’s building, by drawing visitors right to the climactic scene of the battle, offered even more encouragement for hit-and-run patriotism.)
The immense cyclorama has been restored, rehung, and supplemented —as it was when it was first shown — with three-dimensional objects in the foreground, dramatic lighting, narrative and sound effects. It’s a knockout. It successfully transforms a nineteenth century experiment in immersive experience into an information- and emotion-packed spectacle that feels new and exciting even to those with short twenty-first century attention spans.
Visitors leave this center with quite a clear idea of what happened in this horrible, chaotic bloody battle, and prepared, as never before, to confront the tragic pastoral landscape that is Gettysburg itself.
Functionally, the Cyclorama Center has been supplanted, and it may be difficult to find a new use for such a specialized building, except perhaps as a modernist counterpart to the many Victorian and Beaux-Arts style monuments that dot the landscape. After all, part of the story of Gettysburg is that of those who came to visit, from Lincoln onward. How we look at history has a history of its own.
