The first time we drove past the Frank Gehry Experience Music Project building in Seattle, my six-year-old very earnestly said, “Mom, it kind of looks like trash.”
Jeze. Looking at these I’ve concluded my alma mater had some pretty ugly ones.
They really put some thought intothe dorms.
We should get cred for Thompson Hall though.
What’s surprising about that? It’s school of architecture, not the school of engineering. Architects couldn’t put one brick atop another without having a civil engineer around to do the math.
Architects know how to design buildings, not how to build them.
My first exposure to the Longaberger building was as a sleepy passenger late at night. I thought I was dreaming!
I think it’s cute and whimsical.
I can see the Lloyd’s Building from my office. I think it’s really rather beautiful from certain angles. Give me shiny steel over stained grey concrete any day.
heh. Somehow this reminded me of a saying we used to like when I was an EE major:
“Electrical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.”
I hate my school’s architecture building as well. I should be in it right now (I’m taking an urban planning class this semester, and the UP department is located in the architecture building) but I have to finish up a paper for my afternoon class and am playing hookey.
Anyway, it is drab and boring and ugly. It has all the charm of a warehouse, except for sometimes they hang student art on the walls, which is pretty cool. It’s old and there aren’t enough plugs, and the ones there are are inconveniently located. (I’m spoiled because my department’s building was finished in 2006 and is redolent with outlets.) It’s dark and gloomy.
I found all those buildings very interesting looking and many of them quite beautiful. If you want ugly, you need to see SUNY Albany’s campus. This campus was designed for Arizona. It is made of white cement and all the buildings are half buried in the ground. Which may be good for keeping cool in the desert but totally unsuited for upstate NY.
Dingy, grey, squat, waterstained monstrosities.
At the University of Oklahoma, our library was actually attractive. But then, our Physical Sciences building was affectionately known as the Blender.
Speaking of ugly libraries, I’ve gone to two universities and both their libraries were ugly:
University of Calgary McKimmie Library
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/592209070/
Carleton University Maxwell MacOdrum Library (not a great photo)
http://www2.carleton.ca/campus/campus-buildings/macodrum-library/
I guess the lack of windows mentiioned upthread factor in. They’re generally just walls with teeny windows.
Looks like someone stuck a decent enough building on top of a datacenter. What happens in all of that windowless space?
Looks more like a prison on top of a small apartment building.
I think it was office space but I haven’t been there in 20 years.
Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, there are parts of New York and New Jersey that look like this eyesore.
I always believed that the Boston City Hall looked like an old air conditioner, thrown out in the trash. It is dark inside, the roof leaks, the windows leak, and it is drafty and dank.
The Gehry abortion at MIT is in a class of its own-the windows leak, the interior is 80% wasted space, and MIT is actually suing Gehry (talk about locking the barn door after the horse is stolen). It is hard to imagine a building so expensive that fails in its most basic mission-and concrete box would be better.
The Harvard Business School (student housing) looks like a high rise prison.
They don’t call it Brutalism for nothing.
The closet sized offices that ring each floor have windows – they make for nice reading compartments, until you compare that experience to the Hart House library, with windowed alcoves and comfy overstuffed chairs.
Huh- I didn’t realize the Ryugyong Hotel was being completed. I thought it was deemed structurally unsound.
Yeah, that neo-gothic style is prevalent in Moscow and other former communist countries, and it’s hideous.
Well, somehow I missed this thread three years ago. Snookered again. :smack: