Kim Trails

“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 Spengelin and the Oberpostdirektion, nicknamed the “Post Pyramid,” by Gerhard Weber and Georg Küttinger—but Petras had offered another clue: The post office had been replaced by apartments. The Post Pyramid was torn down in 2018, and Google Street View revealed residential buildings rising over the same plot. A final lyrical breadcrumb—“I can see the arches over me”—seemed to match the remnant elevated sidewalks radiating out from the site.

I messaged Nick Weiss, a coproducer and cowriter of “Brutalist,” to confirm my suspicion. While I waited for him to corroborate my hunch—as he later did—I opened Instagram to a collaged meme of Petras next to a picture of the now-pulverized pyramid. A thought bubble above her head read, “hmmmmm today I will alchemize my suffering into architectural allegory.” Apparently, other (younger) architecture gays were already on the case; not only had they solved the mystery, but they had also scooped this veteran columnist.

Best known for songs about sucking and fucking (see 2022’s Slut Pop EP), Petras shifts gears with “Brutalist,” a rallying cry for preservation that also, perversely, celebrates the wrecking ball. In his Pitchfork review, critic Harry Tafoya calls the track “an unresolved, open wound of a metaphor,” though Petras has since resolved it, explaining in the same Fader article that “ruined” refers to the way others described her transition, not how she views her own body. Kim was applauded for writing a complex song about her transition. Would I receive a similarly warm reception for my reheated exposé?

After Deutsche Post sold the building in the mid-aughts, it played the headquarters of a German counterterrorism unit in A Most Wanted Man, Anton Corbijn’s 2014 adaptation of the John le Carré novel. Inside the concrete phalanx, German spies and CIA operatives clash over their intelligence-gathering methods. The building’s afterlives, first as a bit player in a spy thriller and then as a hook in a pop banger, reminded me of the 2020 Wind of Change podcast, which explored how the CIA (no stranger to the culture industry) may have had a hand in penning a chart-topping power ballad about the end of the Cold War by the West German group Scorpions. Architecture never required that kind of covert assistance; the state poured concrete in plain sight.

Part of what made the “Wind of Change” theory so seductive was the song’s incongruity within the larger Scorpions catalogue: a raunchy hair metal band suddenly delivering an earnest anthem for geopolitical rapprochement. Now here was Kim Petras, a songwriter typically concerned with more intimate forms of load-bearing, eulogizing an architectural style reviled by the reactionary right. (Trump himself called the FBI’s brut HQ in Washington, DC, “one of the ugliest buildings in the city.”) Brutalism and transness had found themselves in an unlikely alliance, both targets of conservative culture war ire. But how deep did it go? Was Petras’s architect father simply the perfect cover? Was the pyramid—a millennia-old conspiracy magnet—really a coincidence? Had a global cabal of architecture bloggers and Monocle editors enlisted her as an asset to protect the dolls (the dolls in this case being Paul Rudolph buildings)? More likely, I was simply connecting dots that didn’t exist, trying to concoct a conspiracy for … what? Clicks? Content?

Petras was in New York in June, to headline LadyLand at Under the K, a public park and music venue beneath the soaring spans of the Kosciuszko Bridge. I wanted to go—something about Kim singing “Brutalist” in the shade of an enormous piece of concrete infrastructure seemed like it might unlock the next level in my inquiry—but I balked at the $100 ticket. My last-minute press requests went unanswered, so instead I went to Twinks vs. Dolls, a Pride event pitting the two queer archetypes against each other in a WWE-style competition. After I demolished a few $30 double rum punches, I forgot about Kim Under the K, opting for an upper instead.

Colin, a twinkitect I know, called the Petras concert “life-changing” and described the undercover venue as “being protected by a huge concrete mother.” Another friend, Parker, simply texted “I felt alive” and included a gif of Scarlett Johansson dancing from Marriage Story. Their rave reports sent me on a detour of my own, back to an old architectural fixation. In an undergraduate studio at Vassar, I designed a light-filled gallery where Main Street passes beneath Route 9 on its way toward the Poughkeepsie train station. I made a rendering of a glass box (inside there would be a lone Giacometti) rising between the roadways and transforming, in my idealistic imagination, a dark underpass into both a densely programmed space and a beacon of cultural hope amid city-wrecking highway infrastructure.

On a hot Friday in July, I thought I’d check out Under the K, tickled by its resemblance to the bridge-and-tunnel fantasy I had once proposed in Poughkeepsie. The Newtown Creek–side park, which a sign identified as an “El-Space,” felt airdropped into the industrial landscape. The term refers to the 75 million square feet of underused space that languishes beneath the city’s elevated roadways; this massive perma-shaded world, according to El-vangelists, represents “the next frontier of public space in dense cities.” That frontier is already being contested. A Boiler Room festival I didn’t know about was getting started as security staff at entry checkpoints eyed activists in keffiyehs, who passed out flyers to early-bird attendees about the global rave platform’s alleged links to defense and Israeli capital. I had spent weeks riffing on a radical-left deep state using trans pop stars to propagandize Brutalism, only to arrive beneath the bridge and find accusations of propaganda already underway. Once again, I was late, lost, and not on the list.

Unwilling to add another conspiracy to my muddled mind map, I walked in the direction of the contaminated creek, where Meeker Avenue dead-ends at a small patch of green strewn with concrete ruins. A stray cat slipped away as I approached. A sign marked the site of Penny Bridge, built in 1803 as a one-cent toll crossing and later used for funeral processions bound for Woodside’s Calvary Cemetery. A small sailboat was moored to a makeshift dock, lending the scene an almost pastoral, not un-Hamburgian quality against the wasted waterfront. As ravers streamed past the protesters and toward the park, my transvestigation into a slut-pop psyop had, at the edge of a Superfund site, reached its own dead end. I had come all this way only to find myself loitering amid the husk of an old toll bridge, looking for something worth singing about. And there I thought, “Today I will alchemize my suffering into architectural allegory.”