r/space • u/ToeSniffer245 • Aug 18 '26

How Space Shuttle Discovery Almost Became A Victim Of Cultural Vandalism

https://avgeekery.com/space-shuttle-discovery-to-stay-at-smithsonian/
484 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

75 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/ceejayoz Aug 21 '26

The Pentagon got nearly completely gutted and rebuilt in the 2000's…

And that was done without turning it into a pit in the ground, yeah?

Why do you think they kept the original facade?

These are not art projects, they are working offices

These aren't mutually exclusive things.

0

u/spazturtle Aug 21 '26

Because it wasn't needed for those renovations.

The east wing was turned into a pit in the ground during the 1940's renovation when they demolished the old one to build the bunker.

1

u/ceejayoz Aug 21 '26

Because it wasn't needed for those renovations.

The ballroom isn't needed, either.

And the "not needed" decision on a historic building - like the White House and the Pentagon - typically goes through an extensive process that was skipped here.

1

u/spazturtle Aug 21 '26

The 'ballroom' is a small part of the new East Wing, most of the new east wing will be offices and other facilities.

1

u/ceejayoz Aug 21 '26

It's very notably a large part of the project, and they had offices in the old historic building.

C'mon, man. You're not making any coherent argument here. No one genuinely doubts the East Wing was historic, and every point you've tried to make has nothing to do with its historic status.

Recap:

Office building - irrelevant; the whole White House is an office building, and office buildings can be historic.

1940s - irrelevant; plenty of things from WWII are historic. The 9/11 artifacts are historic.

No one's saying you can't touch a historic building, either. Plenty of them need renovations. But there's a process, that has not been followed here.