World's Ugliest Buildings

[lissener]

@MichaelQReilly

I always tough London’s ugliest building was the Lloyds of London building. Whoever though an office building that looks like an oil refinery was a good idea should be taken out in an alley and shot.

See, that’s brilliant. Almost as good as the Centre Georges Pompidou.

[Malthus]

@Kolga

Okay, seriously, what is the POINT of designing the interior of a building in this fashion? This layout simply guarantees that the only people who can actually find their way around in it are people who’ve been working there for a long time, and that everyone else will just be in a pissed-off mood all the time while they’re wandering around lost.

Heh that’s nothing compared to the confusion caused by the infamous Robarts Library of U of Toronto - my entry for “worst most non-functional building of all time”. Otherwise known as “Fort Book”, this magnificently and unashamedly horrible bit of Brutalism positively grinds the visitor’s face in the dust as it looms menacingly over U of T… it lacks the features most buildings take for granted for human visitors, like windows or a predictable floorplan.

Seriously, the floor plan of the main part of the library was a triangle. For a library that is just plain deliberately cruel. Think about it - normally one would expect, as is generally the case, that the floor plan would be based on some sort of square or rectangle - so that corridors would meet at predictable angels. Looking up stuff was always an adventure in a triangular library …

Allegedly it was the inspiration for the secret deadly labyrinthine library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Wouldn’t surprise me.

Robarts Library

[Giles]

Actually, for an academic or research library, where a major function is preservation of the books and other materials inside, having no windows is an advantage: it means that the air-conditioning costs less to run. One of the largest library buildings in the world is the Madison Building of the Library of Congress, and it has very few windows.

[cactus_waltz]

I have three categories of ‘ugly buildings’. They are:

1. Boring buildings. I typically think of brutalistic project buildings from the 1960’s, grey slabs of concrete.
2. Kind-of-ugly-but-interesting. Buildings which might not be pretty or statements of inspiring beauty but which show artistic intentions.
3. “Dear God, take it away!”. Mostly buildings from categories 1 and 2 that have gone too far. So boring and depressing that you feel life turn into black and white or so crazy ugly that it’s just not fun.

My personal nomination for most ugly building is the Žižkov TV tower in Prague. I was backpacking in Eastern europe when I encountered this, me and my brother had to see it when we took the subway every morning. I loved Prague but I was relieved to get away from that thing. It is essentially a high TV tower with giant crawling babies on it. I repeat: it’s a TV tower with giant crawling babies on it. They are like flies on a sugar cube.

[Malthus]

@Giles

Actually, for an academic or research library, where a major function is preservation of the books and other materials inside, having no windows is an advantage: it means that the air-conditioning costs less to run. One of the largest library buildings in the world is the Madison Building of the Library of Congress, and it has very few windows.

In this case it is the combination of factors - extreme ugliness of building, a totally confusing layout, and no windows - so no way to orient yourself - that makes Robarts the experience it is.

Though I suppose that making stuff hard to find also preserves books from the wear and tear of students handling them.

[Mahna_Mahna]

…and let’s not forget the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library(aka Fort Book).

Any list of Ugly University Libraries would be incomplete if it didn’t include this masterpiece of Brutalism, which somehow manages to be reminiscent of both a giant concrete turkey and a medieval fortress.

ETA: Dang. Malthus beat me to it. This is what I get for spending 20 minutes trying to find a picture that captures Robarts in its total ugliness.

[Dewey_Finn]

@Giles

Actually, for an academic or research library, where a major function is preservation of the books and other materials inside, having no windows is an advantage: it means that the air-conditioning costs less to run. One of the largest library buildings in the world is the Madison Building of the Library of Congress, and it has very few windows.

The Beinecke Library at Yale has translucent marble panels instead of windows, so as to provide diffuse lighting. And the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale is a beautiful one, modeled on a Gothic cathedral.

[Malthus]

@Mahna_Mahna

ETA: Dang. Malthus beat me to it. This is what I get for spending 20 minutes trying to find a picture that captures Robarts in its total ugliness.

When we were U of T students, my wife and I heard a legend that Robarts was not built by human architects, but rather extruded by some sort of insectoid aliens as part of a complex experiment on the nature of humanity. It was dangerous to fall asleep in the stacks, because the aliens would take the opportunity to probe your mind and steal some of your personality for analysis.

Looking at the picture, you can see it was believable.

[friedo]

I’ll probably make some enemies for this, but: the Flatiron Building. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a classic and the first of its kind, blah blah. But guys? It’s a damn triangle. Not even a good triangle, it’s a squished up little triangle. Every time I walk by that place, I want to put that building out of its misery and replace it with a lovely skinny-triangular park.

@The_Bith_Shuffle

Frank Gehry is in a category all his own. I don’t understand how anybody can think any of his buildings are good.

My prior rant about Gehry.

[MrSquishy]

How about the new renovations to the Art Gallery of Alberta (formerly the Edmonton Art Gallery)?

Here’s a webcam on the construction that gives you a bonus view of the ugly (brutalist?) Law Courts Building in the background.

Interesting. When the plan for the renovation was first announced I thought it looked like it could have been a Gehry design, but it is actually Randall Stout. Turns out he worked for Gehry. Big surprise.

[MichaelQReilly]

@lissener

See, that’s brilliant. Almost as good as the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Not surprisingly, the same charlatan was behind both crimes against humanity.

[Green_Bean]

Brutalism! Thank you!

I always loved my hometown library. It was just super-cool. Then I got to Carnegie Mellon and found that Wean Hall was pretty much exactly the same. Except that it had a different layout and wasn’t cool. I always wondered what the style was called.

Apparently, brutalism can be done well or poorly.

[Siam_Sam]

@Max_Torque

I like most of the buildings on the Texas Tech campus, but somehow, the ugliest one happens to be the Architecture building. Looks like a high-rise prison. The funniest part is: look at the very top section of wall. See the bit that’s a little lighter than the rest, doesn’t quite match? Word is that that part of the building collapsed sometime in the 1970s. Yep, the only building on campus that ever suffered a partial collapse was the architecture building.

Hehehe. I’ve actually been inside that building once or twice, having known a librarian in the Architecture library. I never heard the partial-collapse story, and it may not even have existed in the 1970s; wasn’t it built sometime around 1980? Not sure about that. It’s been a long time, but I recall the inside looking unfinished … on purpose! It was the architect’s conception.

As for Frank Gehry, all I know is I enjoyed the 2005 Sydney Pollack documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry.

[matt_mcl]

@lissener

Here’s the problem: part of being a serious artist is the willingness to try to do things differently; not to just churn out one cookie-cutter repro after another. The downside of being a serious artist and an architect, is that you can’t stick your failed experiments–and failed experiments are an essential part of any artist’s growth–in a drawer and forget about them. Once it’s built, it’s built, until it’s unbuilt, which can be as big a project as building it.

I believe it was Frank Lloyd Wright who said that a doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

[FordTaurusSHO94]

Stabler Hall at the University of Arkansas Little Rock is known for being terrible. It looks like they were building a parking deck and changed their minds. It even has those confusing ramps that parking decks have. Good luck trying to figure out what level you’re on!

[Siam_Sam]

@Max_Torque

I like most of the buildings on the Texas Tech campus, but somehow, the ugliest one happens to be the Architecture building. Looks like a high-rise prison. The funniest part is: look at the very top section of wall. See the bit that’s a little lighter than the rest, doesn’t quite match? Word is that that part of the building collapsed sometime in the 1970s. Yep, the only building on campus that ever suffered a partial collapse was the architecture building.

@Siam_Sam

Hehehe. I’ve actually been inside that building once or twice, having known a librarian in the Architecture library. I never heard the partial-collapse story, and it may not even have existed in the 1970s; wasn’t it built sometime around 1980? Not sure about that. It’s been a long time, but I recall the inside looking unfinished … on purpose! It was the architect’s conception.

Ah, no, I see from here that the building dates to 1971.

[Kamino_Neko]

@Dewey_Finn

The Beinecke Library at Yale has translucent marble panels instead of windows, so as to provide diffuse lighting.

Neat idea, but an ass-ugly building, inside and out.

[FlyingRamenMonster]

@Kolga

Okay, seriously, what is the POINT of designing the interior of a building in this fashion? This layout simply guarantees that the only people who can actually find their way around in it are people who’ve been working there for a long time, and that everyone else will just be in a pissed-off mood all the time while they’re wandering around lost.

Apparently, it’s easy to evacuate. And yes, the building is easy to get out of, but I don’t see how it’s better than having five staircases that actually reach every floor. You learn to like the place, though.

[The_Second_Stone]

How is it that Schools of Architecture are the ugliest buildings? (FLW’s Taliesin’s being the exceptions.) Imagine a big city with two such schools. The competition must be uglier than a baboon’s butt.

[FlyingRamenMonster]

It encourages the students