We all live in beautiful cities, towns, buildings, and houses, and they represent our culture and history. They also express our values and aspirations. Architecture from the past illustrates our ancestors, their lifestyles, values, and outlooks. The buildings started becoming taller since the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the 20th century, we built some of the incredible buildings and landmarks. We have demolished some iconic landmarks and buildings that once represented our culture and history.
Here below, we have compiled some of the most incredible buildings, train stations, offices, hotels, and many other architectures that we have demolished. Also, check demolished landmarks and structures of New York City.
To hell with the 1950s and ’60s.
To be fair – a number of those buildings weren’t built to last – and the standards changed pretty quickly.
They weren’t maintained.
Weren’t built to last?! I think when you’re building with marble and granite that’s exactly what you intend for them to do; last. And without human stupidity, those things would last damn near forever with a little maintenance. That was the entire point of building structures in that fashion back then. They intended them to last forever. It was the shortsighted people who came into ownership of those buildings decades later that had the wrong idea.
Most of these fell to urban renewal. Contrast that with new cultural institutions investing in permanence. Foster and Gehry are designing museums built to last centuries. We’re finally learning.
Too bad Gehry’s and many other architects’ are ugly monuments to his ego
Christ I hope this monstrosity doesn’t last centuries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center?wprov=sfla1
#15 being demolished in 2012 is crazy. There had to be serious structural issues or something for people to let it go by then
That was mislabeled. I found an article on the building and it was actually demolished in the 1970s. It was altered a lot from the photo and was in severe disrepair. A park replaced it but from what I could find the site will be used as a future government building again. That website actually has a few misleading information. Some photos are of older iterations of buildings that had already been replaced long ago and the dates on those talk about the originals which were by that point long gone.
Well, that was depressing
I’m a preservationist by trade. You can’t save them all but people try. A lot of these would have fallen down in their own and the best preservation would have been documentation. Most often things like train stations and other public buildings just outlive their use. Look up lighthouses and all the different ways to keep them useful and relevant. Restaurants, b and bs, hotels, light keeper experience destinations. The world passed them by for their original purpose. It’s often cheeper to tear it down and replace than maintain it. All that being said, the number of people that want to tear things down because it doesn’t shut their particular plan or it just annoys them, is astounding.