The Bath Building

Two years ago, I declared the structure above, the Bath Building, as the Ugliest in Raleigh. While I had a change of heart not long after writing the article, it’s still pretty high on the ‘ugly’ list. It is the perhaps the most striking and textbook example of the Brutalist style of architecture. Brutalism is characterized by an imposing rectilinear shape, poured concrete, and sparse use of glass and steel as exterior features.

Raleigh has a plethora of these buildings. Most are in the dead zone, the strip of state government buildings around Blount and Salisbury Streets.

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The hallway between the Learning Commons and the Special Collections Silent Reading Room in NC State’s D.H. Hill Library is used to exhibit various artifacts from the NC State Library’s special collections.

Among other things in the new display is what is believed to be the world’s first fully electric guitar.

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I started out with only a Facebook status update and the vague directions “across from the Carmax on Glenwood” to go on. An hour and a half later, I found the Water Garden.

Walking along Glenwood Avenue after it leaves downtown Raleigh, one feels beyond doubt that this is not a place intended for human traffic. Furniture warehouses and car lots sit in misanthropic isolation off of a busy road with no sidewalk. You’re not supposed to walk around here, and if you do, you feel small and lost in a blinding, concrete commercial desert. On foot, you realize how far apart everything is, how much space there is that possibly no one has walked in years.

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I recently stumbled upon an interesting bit of trivia in an old Wake County Schools publication. It was noted that Raleigh is home to the world’s smallest naval base, located on the grounds of the Josephus Daniels House. Daniels is one of Raleigh’s most notable historical figures: Secretary of the Navy, ambassador to Mexico, and editor of the News & Observer (as well as various smalltown newspapers).

When Daniels moved into his Hayes-Barton home at the end of his appointment as Secretary of the Navy, he wished to have a naval gun mounted on his front lawn. The article stated that the only way this could happen was for the small patch of earth around the gun to be declared an official Navy base.

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