“Nothing Here Survived To The Present Day”: 30 Of The Most Spectacular Examples Of Architecture, As Shared On This Group (New Pics)

This is the second Cliff House. The first version was built in 1863 and destroyed in a fire in 1894. The version pictured above was also destroyed by fire, in 1907. The current Cliff House was built in 1909 (in a neo-classical style), was heavily modified into a "roadhouse" in 1949, then restored to it's 1909 appearance in 2004. The last restaurant/bar, which had opened in the building in 1973, permanently closed on December 31, 2020, and the Cliff House has remained vacant ever since.

So very sad

The bridge is still there, but the towers were removed when the bridge was widened.

I can keep looking at it.

slighly unsettling, kinda looks like is gonna fall to the right

Wars :(

Los Angeles is possibly the city who was impacted in the worst way by motorization and car culture in the mid XX century.

It's better than current day!!

The house was destroyed to make room for a larger one. Flat roofs and rainforests don't mix. (What is it with mid-20th century architects and flat roofs? Just stop it!)

Sometimes artists exaggerate historical beauties. I'm not sure if the dome is that high at its time. Same goes for exaggerated Colossus of Rhodes.

Small time window there. Very similar to the cliff house in San Francisco (currently #1) in that way.

Reminds me of Brighton!

While its destruction was sad, it actually saved hundreds of other cultural heritage buildings due to the public outcry of it being demolished. It lead to the creation of modern historial preservation in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%80%931963)

I thought this rang a bell. There is a corn palace in sout dakota that still exists. I saw signs for it when I drove to SD to see Mt. Rushmore. Didn't actually go to the building. "Built in 1892 in Mitchell, South Dakota, the Corn Palace was created to dramatically display the products of the harvest of South Dakota's farmers, in murals on the outside of the building. The murals are made from thousands of bushels of corn and other grains and grasses such as wild oats, rye, straw, and wheat."

Looks like it’s made out of sand.

Older than the old.

Gorgeous. Including the hilariously inaccurate, vaguely American flag.

And here I thought (or hoped) we were done with this nonsense of needlessly destroying these architectural witnesses of the centuries - it doesn't look in disrepair or anything.

Notre Dame was under reconstruction when the fire broke out. In fact, the fire started in the rafters of the scaffold. (I remember reading that it probably started because of a recklessly discarded cigarette butt). Anyway, many of the statues had been taken down for cleaning, so by lucky coincidence, they were not affectd by the fire.

Undeniably foreboding in this photo

Did it eventually just tip over?

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

I knew Victor Lundy (friend of my parents) and his buildings were notorious for not aging well. He was one of those architects who get so enthralled by their concepts that they completely overlook the fact that people will need to use the building.

I hope they managed to move the people out in time! /s

Mmmm tripe! 🤮

Awwwwe.

Cuba has the same cars today! I shouldn’t be flip. My visit to Cuba last year was depressing.

Based on London's Chrystal Palace which burned down 7 years later after this one.

Collapsed in the November 28, 2021 quake. It was already poorly preserved (as seen by consolidation brackets shown in the photo, that are of an older type and good only to limit bulging, without precompressing the masonry)

That's sad. 😢

Makes me think of the Jetsons! So fun

Natatorium: indoor swimming pool, I guess? Boy, am I learning fancy English architectural speak.

Oh wow! I didn’t know LA had this sort of history

A megalodon of buildings

Replaced by a very nice sitting park.

Pittsburgh IS still a beautiful city. Surrounded by hills and suspension bridges, the downtown of Pittsburgh features an amazingly complex assortment of skyscrapers crammed into a narrow triangle where two rivers join to form the Ohio River. Short of mega-cities like New York and London, I don't think you can possibly find more fascinating architecture per square mile as you can in Pittsburgh.

Would've been destroyed in 1900 by the horrific hurricane which erased Galveston off the map. Thousands upon thousands of people died. The focus of the metro area shifted inland to Houston, whereas Galveston had been the larger city. Today, Galveston does have some gorgeous architecture!

I like this, will still have one in England

Man, people in the the fifties and sixties were just chomping at the bit to ignore history and continuity, and just bulldozed beautiful old buildings w***y-nilly, to put up the FUGLIEST concrete boxes you ever saw, weren’t they? With zero regard for historic value, significance, art, beauty, all that is good and keeps us aligned with our past. My parents’ generation, the one that calls itself the “greatest generation”. Except for getting drafted on the winning side during WWII and managing to survive, they weren’t really all that great at most other things. They polluted our rivers, their factories belched smoke and polluted our air, they threw their trash out their car windows, they created the plastics industry, they drove the most gas guzzling cars and filled them with leaded gas so that anyone born before leaded gas was taken off the market now has traces of lead in their lungs from breathing in the exhaust. They were also the ones in the seventies, who had made it into the executive suite, and threw away every single scientific study that proved their company’s product was environmentally unsound and dangerous, was using up dwindling necessary resources, was totally upsetting ecosystems, was killing people. And they didn’t care, they didn’t try to make their products any cleaner, any less impactful, any less dangerous. They’re the generation who ramped up climate change and kept making it worse instead of trying to clean their messes up. Yeah, THAT generation. I’m 62, and yes, my generation f****d up the economy more than once, and contributed to climate change, though we were too young initially to be making the rules. When we got older, we started being more aware, and at least some of us try to live cleaner lives. It’s going to be the generation entering adulthood now and for the next few decades who will be doing the heavy lifting, cleaning up their parents’, grandparents’, great-grandparents’, and great-great-grandparents’ enormous and dangerous messes. We dropped the ball. I hope they take it, run with it, and finally do what we said we would do, but failed.

Not true! Tivoli Brewery still stands and is a brewery (on the MSU campus) once again!

Milwaukee has a charming mix of old, surviving buildings, and new beautiful buildings.

Why does it look like it's double flipping the bird?

Originally built in St. Louis, USA, for the 1904 World's fair, then transported to Rio some years later. Illegally demolished in 1976 by a corrupt president.

It looks a little bit creepy

Long Beach still has a lot of cool, beautiful architecture. And an area called Naples that still has canals

Interesting architecture, but the first in the list I don't consider a lost that it's gone

Looks more like a church than some of the churches here...

Most buildings from world's fairs are built only for the expo.

Kind of hard to imagine Washington DC being that wide open / so much dirt.

People called it Erich (Honecker)'s Lampenladen (Erich's Lamp Store) because of the gazillion lamps inside

Wow! Brutalist Socialist architecture that's actually SORT of neat looking (depending on the context)!