forgotten walkway

Originally published on Greengale

This post is not significant or profound—qualities best left to an artificial intelligence. Rather it is a vibe balance.

I was momentarily reminded of a location I'd been many times by this post from Ted Underwood, mentioning "brutalism + plants" in reference to a piece of AI art:

https://bsky.app/profile/tedunderwood.com/post/3mddq7cwmck25

Back in my university days, this hallway used to be one of my favorite campus locations. It doesn't have a name and it's not supposed to be like that; it's just an area where a door that used to lead somewhere now faces a small area enclosed by buildings, with overgrown scrubby trees and shrubs having taken over, the ground littered with leaves and decaying organic matter. You can't access this area from the outside without descending one of those walls or the very steep overgrown slope on the right. I don't know what the plan was or what this area was like in the late 20th century when it was constructed, but it is an oddity in the present day.

View from inside a hallway in a building where a glass door and full-length windows reveal an area with overgrown foliage in front of the corners of a concrete building.

This is also the same building that a sniper shot and killed political influencer Charlie Kirk from the roof of in late 2025, which, for a brief period of a few days, put this location in the spotlight of the national news. This media simulacrum of the location was somewhat unwelcome, but ultimately detached from anything to do with the real place, which was swiftly forgotten again by anyone not physically present (except you if you're reading this). I took this photo in 2022 but never shared it before. For all I know, they might have remodeled it by now (I since graduated).

Following this event and the resurfacing of the photo in my camera roll, I have been reminded to share more pictures and thoughts from mundane and peaceful places where no shootings or political upheaval has occurred. These may be worth posting about online for an occasional reprieve from simulacra.

Please enjoy this one of the abandoned Utah Department of Agriculture and Food HQ—a beautiful brutalist structure on the northwest side of Salt Lake City, pictured here in March 2024. I'll have to get back out there and see what it's like now (update: it's gone).

A striking 3-story brutalist building capture on a clear day, with dramatic angled supports extending in front of the windows, a corrugated steel barrier over the entrance. Sparse remains of red paint are visible on some surfaces.

This marks the current entry in my postmodern blog series.