A brutal end for one of Raleigh’s best-known brutalist buildings
The Bath Building — a mysterious, many say ugly, white cube near North Carolina’s Legislative Building in downtown Raleigh — is coming down.
Contractors have begun ripping off the concrete exterior, exposing the building’s steel skeleton. The state may someday build something else on the site on North Wilmington Street, but for the foreseeable future it will remain open space, adjacent to historic homes on Blount Street and across Lane Street from the N.C. Freedom Park.
The building was built in the early 1970s for the state health department, which had labs in the two windowless upper floors. In more recent years, it was mostly empty, and in 2022 former Gov. Roy Cooper asked lawmakers to earmark money to tear it down.
The Bath Building’s design is a form of modern architecture known as brutalism, which favored plain, often hulking concrete exteriors. Brutalism was most popular in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, but fell out of fashion and came to be widely considered ugly.
Paul Coble, a former Raleigh mayor who heads the state office that oversees some downtown government buildings, said in 2023 that the architecture of the Bath Building “just didn’t age well.”
But the building had its fans. Matthew Brown, who lives two blocks away, said he thought it worthy of preservation as perhaps Raleigh’s best example of brutalism.
“The Bath Building is ugly in its own handsome way,” Brown wrote on the website Goodnight Raleigh in 2008.
The building was reportedly named for Bath County, one of the early jurisdictions of the new colony of North Carolina. The county was established in 1696, then abolished after it was divided into Beaufort, Craven and Hyde counties a few years later. Now its namesake building is disappearing, too.
This story was originally published April 9, 2025 at 11:37 AM.
