Oct 11th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Ugly Buildings
Travel and Leisure’s list of the fifteen ugliest buildings in the world mostly just seems to reflect a strong dislike for postmodern architecture. I think this picnic basket building is pretty cool, for example. And this Chinese coin building isn’t ugly at all. This thing in Portland is genuinely bad, but it’s hardly one of the great aesthetic crimes of all time.
I would reserve my ire for projects like City Hall / Government Center in Boston that sort of kill pleasant urbanist neighborhoods. But if you’re going to put up a big office complex in a field somewhere, you may as well try to make the building interest-looking.
65 Responses to “Ugly Buildings”
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October 11th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
What’s wrong with City Hall/Government Center?
Or is MY just expressing a strong dislike for Brutalist architecture?
Which is odd, because DC contains a treasure trove of great Brutalist representations such as Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library, the J Edgar Hoover Building, Third Church of Christ Scientist ; and most of the federal offices on the south side of Independence Ave SW.
October 11th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Longaberger headquarters. I went to high school in Dresden, which is where all the tourists ended up (the basket building is a half hour away in Newark).
I never liked that building. But here people are talking about a basket company.
October 11th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Of all publications, you’d expect a magazine called “Travel & Leisure” to keep on open mind about unusual architecture. Do they advise you against traveling outside small North American towns too?
It’s a credit to their readers that pretty well everyone in their comments thread has called has called bullshit.
October 11th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
What’s wrong with City Hall/Government Center?
It’s not just that it’s a piece of ugly brutalist architecture. It’s that it was also built by bulldozing a neighborhood and replacing it with a large empty courtyard: City Hall is an ugly building in the middle of an empty space.
That and MattY is afraid that his friends will regard him as unsophisticated if he admits that post-modern brutalist architecture is both ugly and inherently anti-urbanist.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Like suicide, brutalist architecture is an oft misunderstood form of expression. That is all, carry on.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I like the Portland building. The coin building is hideous.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
As long as we distinguish “ugliest” from “worst”, I’m not sure I see a problem here. Things can be worthwhile and interesting while still being ugly. I would be pretty dang proud of myself if I owned the world’s ugliest building or painted the ugliest painting.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
The links that NattyB posted would do quite well to replace this web site’s list of the world’s ugliest buildings. The Third Church of Christ, Scientist in particular is genuinely hideous.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Brutalism is remarkably awful. (The University of Illinois at Chicago campus is a nightmare.) I’d suggest Philadelphia City Hall as an example of awful architecture before the International Style. A lot of gothic and neo-gothic architecture is crap, too. I’m blanking on specific examples at the moment.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
The Harold Washington Library? Really? There are at least a dozen shitty skyscrapers in the Loop alone that are worse.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
The idea that Philadelphia City Hall is awful architecture is possibly the dumbest thing ever said in a Matt Yglesias comment section. Yeah, I said it.
Oddly, there’s a bigger incentive to design ugly buildings than attractive ones. The only building in East Midtown that can’t advertise Chrysler Building views is, of course, the Chrysler building. Conversely, I bet the lessors of Citicorp Center can charge bank on the basis of “you don’t have to look at this slanted roof featuring a non-working solar panel.”
October 11th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I don’t know that I would dismiss brutalism out of hand; I quite like the Geisel Library, for example:
October 11th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
The problem with the Boston City Hall/Government Center is that it looks like someone fused a Rubik’s cube with a morgue and put the whole affair on a set of stilts. And the whole neighborhood displacement thing.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
There’s no longer such a thing as architecture any more – just outdoor exhibits of one sort or another.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
The moment you see Harold Washington Library in any collection of the ‘world’s ugliest…’ start to run because it’s nothing but post-modern bashing.
With so many examples of dreadful architecture in Chicago — how ’bout the
CivicDaley Center or any of the buildings around it or the brutalist horror that is UIC — with so many examples like that, HWL with its anti-modernist trim is a welcomed relief.October 11th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
there really is nothing wrong with the Harold Washington library in Chicago, in fact I think it is quite nice. the (sometimes) public space on the top floor is quite remarkable (for the views). I also think that the building has done a lot for the south loop, keying up a lot of development farther south. plus I love the gargoyles because they are cool.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
There’s a bowling alley on Western Ave. in Chicago that’s uglier than any of those.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Tyro: Brutalism is technically more modernist than post-modernist, although it’s sort of in the transitional period.
I think Brutalism can be sorta cool looking, but it has to be done delicately and the way that Boston City Hall was built (as well as how a lot of similar buildings in that era were built) does not really encourage subtlety.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I like brutalism and think that the Boston City Hall is a fine building. However, the courtyard around it and Government Center feel very clumsy to me.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
@17 Waveland Bowl?
October 11th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
If you are going to call out a Chicago bowling alley it really should be The Fireside…
October 11th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Both Philadelphia’s City Hall and the Harold Washington Library suffer from the problem of being a lot of decoration – really nice decoration in the case of the former, really tacky in the latter – in search of a nice building to be on. City Hall’s one savior is that Center City doesn’t really have as much good architecture as somewhere like the Loop.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Holy shit, that Portland building is a cancer on the landscape.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
The moment you see Harold Washington Library in any collection of the ‘world’s ugliest…’ start to run because it’s nothing but post-modern bashing.
No, it’s genuinely ugly. Saying “those who don’t like it are just bashing Post-Modernism” is a straw-man defense. I believe it’s possible to produce good design in any style, and in my opinion, that particular building is not good.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
I was looking through that slideshow and I thought to myself “how could they forget ‘The Gherkin’ building” in London? That thing is hideous. And then I looked on their list of “The World’s Coolest Buildings,” and it was #1: http://www.travelandleisure.com/slideshows/worlds-coolest-buildings/1/
I suppose every top ten list is highly biased, but this is like saying The Sex Pistols were the #1 band of all time. Ironically, the coolest buildings don’t look much different from the ugliest ones…
October 11th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
And then I looked on their list of “The World’s Coolest Buildings,” and it was #1…
Yeah, their idea of “Coolest” definitely has some serious fashion-victim issues.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Given the amount of time that my family and I have spent wandering around downtown Portland specifically looking at architecture, I’m amazed that I simply don’t remember that building, although I must have seen it.
Will look it over next Saturday when we return to do the town.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Not that big a fan of the Portland building, but really, is it that ugly? (Hint: No.)
Fun fact: the statue in front of it is Portlandia, the second largest copper statue in the US after the Statue of Liberty.
October 11th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I like One and Two Liberty Place and the Mellon Bank Building. There are also some great old art deco buildings in center city like the Packard Building. And low-rises in Rittenhouse square. The Academy of Music is a gorgeous building.
The Philadelphia City Hall looks better from a distance, I’ll grant you, but the clocktower with the Billy Penn statue is really elegant. It houses some of the largest vermin in North America — and also the Philadelphia city council!
October 11th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Because it’s so kitsch and self-conscious, I nominate the entire city of Santa Fe.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Interesting that these are mostly post-modern buildings, rather than modernist International-Style or Brutalist buildings. Ten or twenty years ago the consensus was that the International Style (i.e. plain glass boxes) were a huge mistake and postmodernism was the savior of architecture. See Tom Wolfe’s early 80s From Bauhaus to Our House for this kind of thinking. He considered it a great leap forward that some building were going up in New York that didn’t
have flat roofs (the Citicorp Center, the AT&T Building). Nowadays these buildings are being mocked, while ’50s-era modernist buildings are starting to be treated as historic.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Saying “those who don’t like it are just bashing Post-Modernism” is a straw-man defense.
No actually, the building makes it routinely into post-modernist bashing lists. This is simply one of many. Usually they include the AT&T building as well.
It’s nothing new, just a bit tiresome.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Nowadays these buildings are being mocked, while ’50s-era modernist buildings are starting to be treated as historic.
Actually most of them are being knocked down. The public housing in Chicago was almost a paean to modernism/brutalism and most of it was found inhabitable and inhumane. They’ve since been replaced by either grass or lower-storey townhouses — somewhat like the neighborhoods these cement monsters originally replaced.
There is one brutalist skyscraper in the Loop around Jackson which serves as a prison for people awaiting trial. I fully support maintaining that one as an example of the period.
October 11th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Clarification: ‘Actually most of them are being knocked down.’ — ‘them’ being the international-style or brutalist buildings, naturally.
P.S. The ones made of poured cement, which is most of them, are literally crumbling to pieces.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
The problem with all of the above examples of ugly postmodernist architecture is that they gesture at historicism, but without the level of internal detail that those historical styles require. A column without proportions, a Gothic arch in the wrong place… the slow development of say, neoclassical, or Gothic, which cohered over the course of many generations, is now being grasped at blindly, without an understanding of the cultural or institutional histories of this or that feature, or the meanings that those features had to their original designers. This to me breaks the aesthetic effect completely, and ultimately seems childish and uninformed.
Brutalism, however, is another topic for discussion entirely. I think brutalism is often fantastic: I spend a large portion of my days in this building and I think it’s a truly great piece of architecture.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
From the intro to that list:
My sentiments exactly. All those buildings are in my view too interesting to be properly considered among the “ugliest”, but I guess you couldn’t get people to link to a list of ten anonymous warehouses in New Jersey.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
The person who wrote this list has probably never seen the Scottish Parliament, which is all the more horrible because it’s home to a legislature.
Frank Gehry had to make this list at least once. Self-indulgent novels, songs or paintings are one thing. But people have to actually live or work in, or at least drive by, a Frank Gehry building. Ask ten architects what they think of Gehry–I’d bet you’d get 7 or 8 who like brutalist and modernist stuff and 2 who like Gehry.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I guess that he didn’t see the ugly maroon monstrosities that the Portland Building replaced… They were built so poorly they had to be torn down within ten years of occupancy.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
DTM, Bonanos sounds like a major douchebag. Anonymous warehouses in New Jersey work well as warehouses and aren’t poking everyone in the eye and ruining the neighborhood on a regular basis about the architect’s self-indulgent “statement.”
For bad architecture, I regularly consult The Eyesore of the Month.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
…Also, pictures never show it, but the Portland Building is the shortest building save for the old courthouse within two blocks. It fills its space quite well and the bright colors contrast nicely with the dark steel, black glass, grey concrete and maroon marble of the nearby buildings. Even the old courthouse buildings are all made of basalt, so the Portland Building is really a nice contrast.
October 11th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
But . . . but . . . they were!
October 12th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Anonymous warehouses in New Jersey work well as warehouses and aren’t poking everyone in the eye and ruining the neighborhood on a regular basis . . . .
If you don’t like the anonymous warehouse example, then use anonymous strip malls, or anonymous office parks, or anonymous apartment complexes, or any such example involving places people regularly visit, work, or live.
By the way, I’d rather have my eye “poked” then have it chloroformed.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:26 am
@nathanson – that’s exactly the problem. Boston City Hall is elevated on stilts above this massive concrete desert that completely kills the usability of the area. It’s sort of interesting to walk around once, reminds me of the Martian architecture from the Martian Chronicles TV Miniseries – peculiar but totally lifeless.
Still, it’s not the ugliest building in the Boston area.
That would be the Walter Gropius Harvard Law School dorms. They’re so ugly that Harvard doesn’t put a clear picture anywhere on the school’s web site. There are several Gropius leavings in the Boston area, but the law school dorms are the worst.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:28 am
I also don’t find the Fang Yuan Building so unattractive. It looks like some sort of pulley or grooved drum.
I don’t care at all for the basket. If office buildings were just whimsical installations that could be put up one month and removed a few months later, there would be nothing wrong with a cute conversation piece like that. But communities shouldn’t allow that kind of selfish kitsch to be made part of their permanent physical environment.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:47 am
The great fault of post-modernism is the kitsch. The great fault of modern and brutalism is their horrible, awful inhumanity and divorce from any tangible, human scale. I have spent enough time in Brutalist collegiate buildings to despise them forever and ever and ever.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:05 am
super blog//////
thanks for the post!
October 12th, 2009 at 9:12 am
I have a couple friends who work in the Longaberger basket and having seen it up close, it’s very well executed. Quite surreal, but I wouldn’t call it ugly. And as Brent @ 2 noted, it’s a huge tourist attraction among collectors of the company’s baskets.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Speaking of bad brutalist architecture, I vote for the Stony Brook Health Sciences Center…
October 12th, 2009 at 10:10 am
To borrow a line from someone else, the problem with most Brutalist architecture is that the buildings look like they should have Imperial Stormtroopers guarding them.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I for one love the Harold Washington Library. I always point it out when I’m showing my country bumpkin relatives parts of Chicago, and they all love it too. So I guess that makes us all hideous judges of architectural beauty. But that music museum in Seattle? Jesus, that was ugly.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:37 am
@Just Dropping: Take a look at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC. Brutalist monstrosity. It pretty much does have stormtroopers guarding it. At least guys with short haircuts, sunglasses, and short sleeve dress-shirts with ties. Ugh. And the bikelanes around it are always studded with unused traffic cones or idling “official” vehicles.
That building should be razed or moved out of the city. How about National Harbor? Oh, to have that block between Pennsylvania and E St. back for ground floor retail!
October 12th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Brainz:
Brutalism is remarkably awful. (The University of Illinois at Chicago campus is a nightmare.)
Yes, it’s despair-inducing. The UIC campus makes you feel like you’re in a Communist country.
RE: The National Library in Minsk, Belarus. “After all, it’s difficult to begrudge a library with such mojo.” True.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:50 am
U. Mass-Boston makes my list.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Total list fail. I happen to love the Harold Washington, which may be a mishmash of styles but to the untrained eye is a mammoth temple of learning and a fitting tribute to the wonderful Mayor Washington in the middle of the Loop. I even love those totalitarian monstrosities in Minsk and Pyongyang. The enemy is faceless office buildings and fuckugly “luxury high rises.” And yes, Brutalism sucks ass, except when it doesn’t.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Modernist and modernist-influenced buildings look really awful when they start to get run down. I wonder if part of the reason is that in the case of more classic architectural styles, when a building starts to get a bit run down, part of the effect is to make it look more authentically old, so it can enhance rather than undermining the effect. Since the modernist buildings are absolutely not supposed to look old, when they’re anything short of pristine they look shabby.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
From the photo, I like the Harold Washington Library, and the coin building. The T&L folks are right about the Minsk National Library – the base doesn’t work with the rather awesome rhombicuboctahedron building – the base kind of looks like the leftover packaging for the building.
The UFO house and the spheres just need to be kept clean (one thing which makes Victorian architecture look so nice is that it degrades gracefully).
Metropolitan Cathedral in Liverpool needs that slab to go away, and then it will be striking.
Speaking of bad government architecture, San Francisco got saddled with this award-winning building: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danceslut/sets/72157604317027696/
October 12th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Clearly we need a competition that specifically excludes Brutalism, because it’s not a fair fight: for too many of us, a technically competent and even superb Brutalist building is just way worse than a poorly-conceived building in any other genre.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I agree with David B. Philadelphia’s City Hall building is beautiful. And how could anyone seriously like the picnic basket piece of dreck?
October 12th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
re 20 and 21: yep, Waveland Bowl. I like the Fireside, myself.
I’m a little surprised no one’s mentioned Soldier Field. I like that too, myself.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
“Speaking of bad government architecture, San Francisco got saddled with this award-winning building: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danceslut/sets/72157604317027696/
”
I think the building’s great. Typical San Franciscan reaction: can’t tolerate anything either not designed by Stanley Saitowitz or less than 100 years old.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
My vote for ugliest building goes to Cornell University’s Bradfield Hall, which looks like the architect wanted to go all Cask-of-Amontillado on the inhabitants.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
[...] and Leisure selects the worlds 15 ugliest buildings. Read Via Think Progress’s Matthew Yglesias Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize [...]
October 13th, 2009 at 12:16 am
which looks like the architect wanted to go all Cask-of-Amontillado on the inhabitants.
Nice turn of a phrase there.
October 13th, 2009 at 11:49 am
The J. Edna Hoover FBI headquarters building in Washington DC is truly an enormous, tasteless scab on the nation’s Main Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and for architecture as a social science.
But we’d end up in Gitmo we suggested that it be demolished!
October 13th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
[...] So says this list. (h/t Yglesias) [...]