Музыкант призывает сохранить уникальный бруталистский гуманитарный корпус UW-Madison перед сносом

Fifteen years ago, in the basement of the George L. Mosse Humanities Building, I stood in the hallway outside the stage doors to Morphy Recital Hall. I held my trumpet in my hands, nervously pressing the piston valves up and down, going over and over a difficult passage. I was about to perform in my junior recital. Thunder boomed outside. In front of me, a small bucket tried in vain to catch the water pouring down from the ceiling. It had already overflowed, and a puddle around it grew larger by the minute. In retrospect, this feels symbolic of that building’s issues. The hulking concrete structure was built in the late 1960s. It’s a prime example of brutalist architecture, a style that favored function over form. As the university has added new facilities — like Hamel Music Center in October 2019 and Irving & Dorothy Levy Hall this summer — the building faces obsolescence and, eventually, demolition. A time will come when there is nothing left of that strange, ugly and unique building, and most will understandably celebrate its demise. But before it goes, I want you to know that it is loved — if not by all, then at least by me. When I attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2008-12, no one on campus seemed to like the Humanities Building except for me. Students complained that it was a mess to navigate and an eyesore to behold. From the sidewalk, they could see the way the rust dripped down the cement from the metal windows. It was rarely cleaned, and never thoroughly. The strange long corridors simply had too many nooks and crannies. Growing up in Madison, I spent seven summers at the UW–Madison’s Summer Music Clinic, a youth music camp that had me trekking from the dorms in the old Ogg Hall (which was demolished in 2007) on Johnson Street to the Humanities Building. While other kids have summer camp memories built around rustic cabins and lakeside campfire sing-alongs, mine were formed in rehearsal room 1341. In middle school, my stand partner for the week — a kid named Beau — asked me to slow dance at the social that night. Later, as an undergraduate student pursuing a music performance degree, I spent all my spare time holed up in dingy practice rooms in the building’s basement, surrounded by other music majors practicing, gossiping or napping in the small spaces around me. For at least two semesters, all of the classes I took were in that building. It was my home. My weird, gross home. Once, during my sophomore year, I opened the door to a practice room. The small space was occupied only by a music stand, an upright piano, a chair and a single cockroach, perched on the chair. “That one was already taken,” I said when I returned the key to the confused student worker at the key desk moments later. I was often the first one in the practice rooms in the morning, sometimes arriving before the student who manned the desk. He frequently overslept. Eventually, he got tired of my texts asking when he’d arrive and gave me the passcode to the key desk so I could take my desired practice room key for the day. I would practice between every class and often late into the night, alternating between the grind of etudes and rudimentary exercises — meant to increase my endurance and range — and playing orchestral excerpts in the impossible pursuit of a perfect attempt. I favored the bay of eight practice rooms numbered 1531 to 1538. When I started my degree, it was mostly used by string players. By the time I graduated, brass players had fully taken over those rooms. When I wasn’t practicing, I studied, wrote essays and even ate my lunch and dinner in one of those rooms, usually while seated on a posture-correcting performance chair, my laptop resting on top of the piano playing episodes of “Parks and Recreation.” My favorite practice room has a mural painted on the wall. It’s made to look as if someone used a tuba to break down the wall of the room, revealing the intersection of Johnson and Park Streets and Grainger Hall beyond. It was the closest thing I had to a window. Two rooms down the hall, there was a condom hanging from a light fixture. I know the story of how it got up there but that’s not mine to tell. The exterior was austere, the interior decrepit. But there’s something poetic about a building that is perhaps the epitome of brutalism in our city also being the home to decades’ worth of burgeoning young artists. At its core, brutalism was a hopeful movement, associated with socialist utopian ideals born from the post-World War II reconstruction era. Each musician and artist inside that building was like a dandelion growing through a crack in a sidewalk, finding a way to thrive. In the balcony of Mills Concert Hall, completely empty and dark except for the glowing exit signs, I heard the words “I love you.” We stood alone in the concert hall, as though a performance had just ended, sharing that strange, beautiful, liminal space where time had stopped. We swayed back and forth, hands intertwined, my head resting on his shoulder. Although it was silent, there was music playing for us. I like to believe that falling in love in a building built to withstand riots (if you believe the myth) is part of why that love, too, is sturdy and enduring. I don’t often venture back into that building, but I wonder about it like an old friend. Does the whole building still smell like warm rain on summer nights? From the fourth- and fifth-floor offices, can you still hear skateboarders ignoring the “no skateboarding signs” or the unicycle polo players shouting in the open space on the third floor? When the weather is good, do tuba players still practice in the courtyard, filling the inside and outside of the building with otherworldly vibrations, as though their resonance can rattle its very bones? Even when the George L. Mosse Humanities Building is a pile of rubble on a city corner, the art, music and love that was born inside those walls will live on in my brutalist heart, durable and hopeful. Megan Aley is a writer and musician based in Madison. COPYRIGHT 2026 BY MADISON MAGAZINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.