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.

[6] 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.

[6] Funding requests to rehabilitate the Cyclorama Building were denied in 1993 and 1996, i.e., $2.7M in 1993 for roof removal/replacement, asbestos ceiling removal, patching cracks and treating masonry, and redesign of interior.

[9]: 126  During this time, Dion Neutra, the architect's son (who worked on the design) launched a preservation campaign that generated more than a thousand letters of support.

[11] After the building was not added to the National Register of Historic Places,[12] in 2010, a U.S. District court judge ruled for the Recent Past Preservation Network (Plaintiff) that the NPS "had failed to comply with federal law requiring it to analyze the effect of the Cyclorama Center demolition and come up with alternatives to destroying it.