“Brutalist” isn’t the catchiest track off Kim Petras’s new album, Detour—I had been wailing the words to her faux-country single “Jeep” for weeks—but when I heard the opening verse my ears perked up: “There was a building there / and it was Brutalist.” “And it was beautiful / it was my favorite,” she continues, tastefully. Then comes the bad news: “But it’s not there no more because they tore it down / They really ruined it (Yeah).” As I processed this hate crime against concrete, an auto-tuned lede for my next column tongue-popped into place.
But what building was Petras talking about?
Fan-clack. Clue one. Though she grew up outside Cologne, Kim told The Fader that she and her architect dad (“my dad’s an architect”) would travel to Hamburg for her transition-related psychological assessments, and along the way he would point out buildings he liked, including a Brutalist post office. Strangely, #SOSBrutalism, a global database of endangered slab, turned up not one but two 1970s post offices in Hamburg that fit the description—Postamt 60 by Friedrich and Ingeborg S…
