Cyclorama Building (Gettysburg)
building at the Gettysburg Battlefield
The Cyclorama Building was a modernist concrete and glass Mission 66 building in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States. It was dedicated November 19, 1962, by the National Park Service (NPS) to serve as a Gettysburg Battlefield visitor center, to exhibit the 1883 Paul Philippoteaux Battle of Gettysburg cyclorama and other artifacts, and to provide an observation deck (replacing the 1896 Zeigler's Grove observation tower). The building was demolished in 2013.
History
Richard Neutra was awarded the design, and began work in 1958. The design included a central park administration office, space for the cyclorama painting previously held remotely at Baltimore Road, and an auditorium that opened out onto the adjoining lawn. Neutra subtitled the building "the Abraham Lincoln Shrine of the Nation."
Orndorff Construction Company, Inc., won the construction contract with a bid of $687,349, in 1959. The site at Ziegler's Grove was intended to tie the painting closely to the battle location it depicted. The total construction cost was $959,603. The building was dedicated on November 19, 1962, the 99th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
Toward the end of the 20th-century attitudes towards battlefield presentation had changed, and the National Park Service sought to remove many modern structures from key sites.
“Cyclorama Building (Gettysburg)” enters the record as building at the Gettysburg Battlefield. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cyclorama, Building and Gettysburg can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Cyclorama Building (Gettysburg)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Cyclorama, Building and Gettysburg provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5198995. Authority coordinates are 39.816, -77.234. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1883, 1896 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cyclorama Building (Gettysburg)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.