The cover is black with purple text. It shows a close up, blurry image of a building in the background, seen at night with yellow lit windows.
Credit: Courtesy Wendy's Subway

Like a brutalist architect, Toby Altman is working with unrefined materials. In Discipline Park, his second full-length poetry collection, Altman choreographs a dynamic dance between sentimentality and brutalism by documenting the wounds of architecture—fixating on his birthplace: Chicago’s demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital. “Wagering that concrete or plywood might serve as the entrails of the world,” he shapes a monolithic poetry inspired by the imposing structures of midcentury brutalism. He imagines the béton brut, or raw concrete, as vulnerable to our human emotions, modeling his poetics from memory.

Discipline Park disarms us, unraveling our dispositions with meditations on the hospital—a structure resistant to the world but built to improve functionality and even the simplest human movement. The Prentice Women’s Hospital, designed by brutalist architect Bertrand Goldberg, is an unlikely muse. But Altman’s proximity to the building fostered an inexorable connection that inspired his monumental poetic project. Not only was he born inside the building, but he was also working as a teaching assistant at Northwestern University, which owned the hospital, when they demolished it in 2013 and 2014. 

The author poses in front of a Bertrand Goldberg building. Raw concrete and rounded windows are seen behind Altman. Altman wears a grey sweater and glasses.
Author Toby Altman
Credit: Emily Barton

Preservationists and prominent architects petitioned the university to stop the demolition, appealing to Chicago’s devotion to architectural history. But ultimately, Goldberg’s building was flattened, and with it, his ideology questioned. Goldberg designed with a human-centered approach, prioritizing movement and social interaction. His vision perseveres in his other Chicago landmarks, such as Marina City and River City, but the demolition of Prentice Women’s Hospital upset Goldberg’s utopian promise of architecture. Altman examines the buildings as “fragments of another, better world,” pained by the architect’s unrealized vision. 

Discipline Park developed into a clinical investigation of the toxins of neoliberalism and the complicated, often devastating, wounds of industrial architecture. Unlike a typical architectural survey, Altman crafts a blunt text that juts out into the world, mirroring Goldberg’s brutalist impetus “that a building becomes perfectly visible. So that it is divided from the world in which it resides. Not an organ of the world but an object.” For Altman, language and memory are the material to become visible. 

Architecture either abides by its environment or disrupts it. Discipline Park reimagines it. Altman’s prose blends modes of autobiography, architectural history, and reflections on society into a compelling rumination on how we shape our environment. Or, possibly, how our environment shapes us. His lengthy meditations are accompanied by blurbs of white text filled with quotes or vignettes of civic history. The multivocal poetry facilitates a text that enjambs, that sneaks through the tight corridors, that refuses to hide its raw material. Discipline Park enacts brutalism in language, prioritizing human movement by “preparing the paths and platforms that enable and ennoble even the most mundane of human actions.” In these paths, we discover our vulnerabilities.

But Altman’s fascination with brutalist functionality does not lend itself to a conventional straightforwardness. Instead, he presents images of the Prentice Women’s Hospital that are skillfully recontextualized. His ability to reenvision our perception of architecture echoes surrealist artist Alexander Rodchenko’s photographs of transmission towers. Where Rodchenko reorients our point-of-view of industrial structures, Altman twists our perspective on brutalist buildings by conflating poetry and architecture until the delineations between structures and individuals become nearly indeterminate. In Discipline Park, emotions are attached to buildings designed to embrace mundanity and function, not sentimentality. 

Similarly, the book’s unfastened, autobiographical narrative tends to stray into several distinct visions. The hospital acts as Altman’s provenance, a foundation where he transports us into different perspectives. He resists completion or permanence, relying on unrefined ideas to embody the béton brut. What emerges is a modular poetics that can be categorized with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a cyclically redefined city. Near the beginning of the book, Altman asks us to, “Imagine another city, in which pain has been rigorously segregated from the population. This city is architecture without loneliness, architecture without need.” In his variations, Altman adorns brutalism with the raw material he extracts from our collective and his wounds. And the images parsed throughout the collection emerge renewed with every page.  

Despite brutalism’s austerity, Altman imbues his text with remarkable tenderness. He follows his elongated observation of the hospital with vignettes of Goldberg’s architectural achievements. These subsequent journalistic entries confirm Altman’s potent admiration of Goldberg as an artist. But in Discipline Park’s final section, Altman turns his critical eye onto himself and Goldberg, noting the crucial shortcomings of brutalism. With the hospital demolished, Altman offers one final testament to his collection’s honesty, reflecting on Discipline Park’s genesis and dedication to the raw concrete—sediment that’s disguised as intractable. 

Discipline Park punctures our world. It balances critiques on architecture, capitalism, institutional violence, and whiteness, all while attempting to personify failure. Altman’s text is uncompromising and authentic. The text is impaled and demolished, and yet, it never stops in its failure. He systematizes brutalism, using language to create contours that resist the earthly landscape. In this, the language and the poetry are never concealed, allowing for their beauty to materialize. Altman sums it up perfectly, writing:

“If one is to resist the production of objects—in literature as much as architecture—one must produce a writing that fails. Fails to end. Fails to set, to harden in its formwork. A writing which has the bitter texture of history: biting, angular, precise, luxurious. It remains in motion even after its motion has ceased.”

Discipline Park by Toby Altman
Wendy’s Subway, paperback, 112 pp., $18, wendyssubway.com

related stories