I’ve seen the Palace of Culture in Warsaw when I went on holiday there, and my friends and I all commented that we expected the Eye of Sauron to start tracking us at any moment. Even worse is the plaque near it which reads that it was a gift from the loving comrades of the people of Russia to the people of Poland. Yeah, right, built by Poles using their money and probably not because they wanted to.
Not an example of bad architecture, but simply an ugly building, there’s an office tower that I go past in the train on my way to work every day. The train goes right past the window and the inside looks as bad as the outside - every day I think “hey, it’s not so bad, at least I don’t work there”.
Also there’s the South Bank centre on the river Thames in central London which is pretty fugly too. I think it was made by the same people who created the Portsmouth Tricorn centre as it shares some of the same features (like the horrible staircases).
That’s the point… You do have wasted space; you do have tilted walls; you do have windows that point at the ground; you do have a level floor with slanted windows.
The interior of those “cube houses” is the INSANEST place I’ve seen in my life. It defines the word “kafkaesque” to a T.
Wait, you guys have got a flying saucer landing port and haven’t told anyone about it? (Kind of reminds me of the house they kept Willard Whyte in.)
IIRC, MIT is suing the architects involved with designing some buildings that look like they’re being sodomized by a Transformer, because the things are falling apart and they’ve only just been completed.
Then there’s the Plaza Tower in New Orleans. It has the distinction of not only being the ugliest building in Louisiana, but has been nearly uninhabitable for years because of severe mold and mildew and moisture problems. The only tenants left in it pre-Katrina were a couple of government offices whose employees were chronically ill from the building. I have no idea what’s happened to it post-K.
No, Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles. Got some major prizes for it, too. IM Pei did the Hancock, though.
It was, to make room for City Hall and the surrounding brick-tundra “plaza”. Planning to move or replace the building, and restore Scollay Square, are chestnuts of architecture/urban planning students’ theses, but don’t expect anything to come from them.
I’d heard of the Pyongyang hotel, but had no idea just how atrocious it is until now. Looks like it’s ready to take off and fly into orbit, where it should remain.
I used to work in an IM Pei “masterwork” bilding, the east building of the National Gallery of Art in DC. There were no walls at right angles in the entire building, including the offices. Anytime you wanted to reorganize the workspace, you had to have custom furniture built, or carpenters and architect come in to design and build custom workstations in. You also couldn’t make any changes to any part of the interior of the building that was accessible by the public, unless the plan was approved by Pei. Of course, that made changes pretty much impossibly expensive.
It was a huge pain in the ass, and everyone who worked in the building hated it.
On the designer’s page there’s some crap explaining that the ‘saucer’ houses the highest court in the land, and it is a modern reinterpretation of the former supreme court’s dome (which was a more aesthetically pleasing neoclassical design).
Maybe this proves we’re governed by cybermen or something :dubious: .
(Kind of reminds me of the house they kept Willard Whyte in.)
