Fergie's Tech Blog

Off Beat: U.S. Navy to Mask Swastika-Shaped Barracks

The buildings, constructed in the 1960s, are on the Coronado amphibious base and serve as a barracks for Seabees. Image source: LA Times / Google Earth

The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air.

The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees.

From the ground and from inside nearby buildings, the controversial shape cannot be seen. Nor are there any civilian or military landing patterns that provide such a view to airline passengers.

But once people began looking at satellite images from Google Earth, they started commenting about on blogs and websites about how much the buildings resembled the symbol used by the Nazis.

posted by Fergie @ 9/26/2007 05:48:00 PM