For a small value of famous, of course.
That’s not nearly as beautiful as the real one. And it looks much smaller.
When I visited I was surprised at how small the real Taj Mahal is. And a lot of the inlay work is mssing, so up close it’s not as beautiful as I imagine it once was.
Tinged? Hardly. Blatant is better.
Well, eye of the beholder etc. The original plans were much more overtly Klantastic; what’s there is pretty watered down but is still on a sacred Klan mountain and I doubt it attracts many nonwhite visitors.
The problem with these sort of things is that they are very dependent on the geology of the mountain. There’s a reason that they didn’t build Mount Rushmore closer to the East Coast.
Add to that the fact that reconstructing a mountainside sculpture takes decades (as opposed to the years that rebuilding a more conventional monument might take), and you’ve got plenty of reason to think such monuments wouldn’t be rebuilt if they were destroyed.
Oh, and here’s another candidate (or rather, candidates) for the list: major European cathedrals. Repaired after sustaining major damage, sure, but I doubt if one was totally razed there’d be much done to rebuild it. It would simply cost too much.
Its also illegal now, so you’d literally need an act of Congress.
For much the same reason and the sheer expense, the Grand Canyon. Much of its attraction is because it’s natural; and digging out a new one after the old somehow collapsed/filled in would be ridiculously expensive.
Oh, I’ve heard similar things, but just comparing the one in Bangladesh to the real one (especially using people as scale), the real one looks much bigger and more detailed.
Actually I have seen the rebuilt Cathedrals in central Nuremberg Germany, they were blasted apart by Allied bombing and reconstructed stone by stone as was much of the central walled city. The pictures of the bombed out city are devastating. Slight aside, the courthouse where the Nuremberg Trials were held was one of the few buildings in town to largely undamaged and it is just a few yards/meters from one of the destroyed Churches.
Capt
When the St. Louis Space Needle toppled over, and the rotating restaurant at the top screwed it’s self into the banks of the Mississippi, they just re-named it the “St. Louis Arch” and pretended the Space Needle never existed. *
- Swiped from the National Lampoon.
St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna was heavily damaged in the war (but not razed to the ground). The Austrians did a wonderful job recreating the elaborately tiled roof, but most of the original stained glass windows were destroyed, and the replacements are a mosaic pattern in pastel colors. They look like Tupperware. When you compare them to the few surviving 14th century windows in the nave, it’s sad.
Because of the ugly new windows, I’d count that cathedral as only partially restored.
That’s funny, I thought of the Lincoln as the monument that would be rebuilt and not changed at all, and the Washington as the one that shouldn’t be rebuilt. It’s an obelisk. Great. Yeah, it was an amazing structure for its time, but nobody is touched or inspired by that monument.
The World War II Memorial shouldn’t be rebuilt either, but let’s get real, it would be.
I’m torn on whether Tower Bridge in London would be rebuilt. It is iconic, but something tells me that it would be replaced by an ultra modern glass and steel thing.
You’d be wrong about that. It’s a big amusement park now.
Improve the Lincoln Memorial? I don’t believe that is possible. I don’t know how one can visit that site and think it was anything but perfect.
Mt. Rushmore would be amazingly hard to replicate. If they did, there would be intense pressure to change the faces- probably Reagan, Kennedy, and FDR would each have fans that would demand a spot. They’d probably have to go to eight faces.
There’s a monument to the Boer War on University Ave in downtown Toronto. I am certain that this monument would not be replaced if destroyed, because very few Torontonians know about the Boer War anymore. It seems so obscure and far away. It would be like finding a memorial to the War of 1812 in downtown Johannesburg.
I thought the reason was that South Dakota wanted a tourist attraction.
They probably find it Boering.
I was going to nominate the Heyward Shepherd Memorial Marker in Harper’s Ferry, for much the same reasons as the other Confederate apologia mentioned above, but it seems almost superfluous now. However, it’s an especially stupid one, specifically celebrating those Southern slaves who did NOT revolt during the Civil War:
Seriously.
Where you in DC when the Washington Monument was covered in illuminated scaffolding? I thought it looked amazing and if they rebuilt it, I’d want them to make it a permanent feature. Also, I’d want them to rebuild the Washington Monument because if the didn’t, they’d put a Walmart on the site by the end of the year.