.

Once the Future

You were the future once, not long ago.
Your sterile walls of concrete, brick, and glass
Outlined in steel, and jutting angles show
Scorn for the forms you thought you could surpass.

That future now has come—with water-stains,
Sun-bleaching, rust, and there a pressure-crack;
The vision once designed to awe now pains.
The form that once looked forward hearkens back.

Your neighbors never posed as avant garde,
Their tamer forms content with their own time.
They turn no heads, while those you turn regard
But incongruity well past its prime—

The relic of a future from the past,
That never came, and that you now outlast.

.

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Adam Sedia (b. 1984) lives in his native Northwest Indiana and practices law as a civil and appellate litigator. In addition to the Society’s publications, his poems and prose works have appeared in The Chained Muse Review, Indiana Voice Journal, and other literary journals. He is also a composer, and his musical works may be heard on his YouTube channel.

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22 Responses

  1. Cynthia Erlandson

    This is a marvelous subject, Adam, with so many lines that blew me away with both their truth about the ugliness of so much modern architecture, and the beautiful way you’ve expressed the ironic “incongruity” of future and past, interweaving them throughout, beginning with the first line. “The form that once looked forward hearkens back”, and “Scorn for the forms you thought you could surpass” lead inexorably to the final, emphatic couplet, which I think echoes the first line. Profound and beautiful!

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you! One of the most striking features of brutalist buildings, after their crushing ugliness, is how egregiously out of date the supposed “future” from fifty years ago now seems.

      Reply
  2. Gigi Ryan

    Dear Adam,

    “The vision once designed to awe now pains.” Well said and sadly true.
    Thank you for this honest and well written poem.

    Gigi

    Reply
  3. Joseph S. Salemi

    It is said that doctors bury their mistakes, while architects simply plant ivy. I don’t know if brutalist architecture would look any better when ivy-covered, since many of its surviving partisans make sure that no organic growth ever is allowed to cover up these monstrous abortions.

    I had a maternal uncle whom I dearly loved, and who was in all respects a great guy. But he always expressed his admiration of these brutalist steel-glass-and-concrete horrors, and was largely unmoved by the architectural triumphs of past ages. I think it was because he had an unshakable belief in “the future,” from a liberal-secularist point of view.

    I notice also that one of my literary heroes, H.L. Mencken, strongly disliked any extraneous ornamentation in either furniture or architecture, and preferred aesthetic horrors like Danish Modern, Mies Van Der Rohe tubular chairs, and some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s really stupid buildings. Even a brilliant writer like Mencken had a streak of bad taste.

    But apart from these exceptions, I think Adam has put his finger on an inescapable truth: this kind of brutalist, modernist, internationalist garbage is UGLY and INHUMAN, and more and more human beings are starting to ask why the bloody hell do we have to tolerate it.

    It’s only a matter of time before these worthless edifices start to be demolished.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      There seemed to be a collective madness in the last century regarding architecture (among many other things), with the erecting of glass-and-concrete monstrosities exacerbated by razing beautiful and solidly-built older structures. It was an unforgivable crime. For all his brilliance, HL Mencken was very much a product of his time.

      This particular poem came in a flash of inspiration not from a public building but from a residence. I was driving back from court in Michigan City, IN, and found this 1970’s brutalist monstrosity in the middle of what was once (and maybe still is) one of the city’s nicer neighborhoods. All of the surrounding traditional houses, most of them no less than eighty years old, aged well and still looked beautiful, but the supposedly new and futuristic building not only looked out of date, but suffered much more wear because of its cheap materials and shoddy construction. It was modernism encapsulated in a single structure.

      Reply
  5. Roy Eugene Peterson

    There is nothing to love about “brutalist” architecture and your exposure of this travesty is much needed.

    Reply
  6. C.B. Anderson

    These monstrosities will be with us for a long time, but we might ask: Who is buried in Granite’s tomb? Though ornamentation is not the same thing as art, it comes close.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Not sure how long they’ll be with us. Concrete and glass are not very durable, and I wager the magnificent stone facades of older buildings will remain standing long after modern architecture has all crumbled to dust.

      Reply
  7. Cheryl Corey

    When Trump was in office, he commented on the ugliness of federal buildings. He wanted a return to the classical Greco-Roman style of our heritage. Let’s hope that someday it comes to pass.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Federal buildings display some of the worst architecture because the money used to build them is taken by force. In effect, the ugliness is imposed on the public by force, when a private company would wither under public criticism. There’s a joke that if you’re ever looking for the federal building, find the ugly sculpture and it’s right behind there.

      I think the return to classical architecture as government policy should go further: not only require classical architecture for all new buildings, but order all of the brutalist monstrosities to be razed to the ground. Radical, yes, but it’s what is needed.

      Reply
  8. Margaret Coats

    Adam, the word that struck me in your carefully phrased poem is “incongruity.” This comprehends propriety and utility, and it seems you argue as well for sensitivity to the present, rather than useless fantasy about the future. From the beginning, the buildings under criticism contained much unusable space, and interior modifications had to be made so that business could be carried on. All the more so as the real future has arrived, with new demands for security and support for technology. These buildings have proved to be art for the architect’s sake, winning him awards no one cares about, with facades meant to impress by their strangeness. Sad to say, the same continues. A brand new police building in the next town has had to install massive, difficult-to-operate shades because glass at crazy angles heats a vast space beyond human comfort levels. Too bad they didn’t cover it with solar collectors!

    Your poem is not a quick read, but demands clear, analytical thought, which is the right tack, considering the subject. May the message be heard more widely.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Yes, Margaret — you’ve hit the nail right on the head. The idiots who designed these brutalist modern abominations never gave the slightest thought to the fact that human beings were going to have to live or work in them. All they cared about is what the buildings looked like, and how their reputations as cutting-edge innovating geniuses would be enhanced by the strange and ugly appearances. Did Wright even consider, when designing the Guggenheim, that museum visitors didn’t want to climb up a spiral ramp when viewing artwork? Did the buffoons who built the Pompidou Center consider that plumbing and electrical work is unsightly, and should not be visible? Did the jackasses who set huge panes of permanently immovable glass as “windows” in office buildings forget that human beings need ventilation?

      I loathe a great many things in modernity, but modern architecture is one of the abortions that can send me over the edge into pure rage. It is deliberately, spitefully, and aggressively anti-human.

      Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you for the comments on my poem. We all have stories about the travesties wreaked by modern architecture. Yours is a good one. And the architects’ hubris infects the structure, too. I talked once with an architectural engineer who did not have very complimentary things to say about the architects he worked with. He said how nearly all of their designs were not structurally sound and he had to fight them to modify their plans so that the buildings wouldn’t collapse.

      My experience with this (obviously, perhaps) is courthouses. In Indiana we are lucky to have 84 of our 92 historic courthouses still standing and used (and a tornado took out one of the destroyed ones). Ohio and Pennsylvania are similar. But go to Illinois or Michigan, and most of their historic courthouses were razed for cheap cinder-block buildings that are now falling apart. The difference is profound. Trying or arguing a case in a beautiful old courtroom conveys a sense of importance to what you are doing; in a cinder-block cube, it’s a mere business transaction — which is perhaps exactly what the aesthetic hopes to achieve. Nothing sacred, nothing to receive from generations past.

      Reply
  9. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Adam, from the intrigue of your title to the sagacious observation you make in your powerful closing couplet, this sonnet captures the aftermath of the ghastly architecture that afflicts a society forced to embrace the tasteless. Thank you.

    Reply
  10. Shaun C. Duncan

    This is a great subject matter for a poem and your execution is flawless. The aesthetic arrogance of brutalism, though now superseded and somewhat softened by the so-called international style, is the perfect expression of our modern anti-culture and your sonnet has captured its ugliness wonderfully and with great economy.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you! “Anti-culture” is a perfect description; often the ugliness of the structures was exacerbated by razing beautiful and well-constructed earlier buildings. It was nothing short of a deliberate attempt to destroy the old world and build a brave new one.

      Reply
  11. Daniel Kemper

    Adam, first: a solid poem and a great subject. I look for your work and the frequency that your musical sensibilities emerge in it.

    The sentiments here I largely agree with, save that I think the brutality (f*ing place looks like a prison to me) does not accidentally “forget” that people have to live there. I think it’s deliberate Marxist dehumanization.

    The best that can be said of it is either that it could be used as a prison or, at least it’s not post-modern.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you! I’m not as harsh on postmodern architecture as the monstrosities of brutalism. The postmodernists at least adopt traditional styles if only to mock them. There’s at least some humanity in that. Brutalism, however – as you observe- is intentionally soul-crushing, and therefore a favorite of oppressive regimes (now including ours).

      Reply
  12. Joshua C. Frank

    Good description of these ugly buildings. I saw a meme that said, “When you understand that beauty motivates men to greatness, modern architecture makes a lot more sense.” The powers that be want us surrounded by ugliness so we won’t rise above ourselves. That’s why they take a wrecking ball to the beautiful statues in so many Catholic churches and make the new churches look like Our Lady of Burger King.

    The more I learn about modern culture (Shaun’s description of it as an “anti-culture” is really more on target), the more disgusted I am by it.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      You are absolutely right and this is why our “conservatives” are such wimps (or p—-ies, as I really want to say). All of these hideous monstrosities should go under the bulldozer the minute we acquire any authority over them. But we don’t. We’d rather talk about tax policy.

      Reply

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