Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder...

...but when a building is fugly, it doesn't matter who beholds it, it's ugly.  Let's just take this little diddy here:

This structurally broad-shouldered guy is the J Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington DC.   It is a consensus uggo.  The only beholders who could possibly allow their eyes to see beauty in this are the guy who designed the thing (Hoover FBI Building), Stevie Wonder, the guy who designed this quintessential piece of Stalinist-era stereotypically oppressive Russian apartment block (which I found here),

or Noel McKinnell and Gerhard Kallmann who designed the East Coast landmark that is Boston's City Hall (photo from here).

So why am I on about ugly buildings?  Well, talking bad about ugly buildings is one of my favorite things to do.  Its almost automatic when you have an architectural education like I did; where often beauty was prized over function, reason, and practicality.  But really, I was inspired by an article that came up on my Yahoo! homepage a few days ago.

The article was Bunny Wong's "The World's Ugliest Buildings" for the October 2009 Travel+Leisure.  Its a good enough compilation of 15 ugly, stupid, and generally bad buildings (certainly no list of 78, but good enough), but I'd like to point out my favorites.  Let's start with the buildings that are really just a joke that took structural form.

We start with the Page 6 Building: the Longaberger Home Office in Newark, OH. (photo source)

The company is a woven basket company...get it?!

Lets look at what Bunny said:  "...it’s as if, in 1997, a giant-size Little Red Riding Hood set down her seven-story hamper on a flat section of Ohio. ... True, the company purveys handcrafted baskets. And founder Dave Longaberger’s dream headquarters was a replica of his favorite basket. But hey, Crate & Barrel employees don’t schedule meetings in a 10-story sofa."

Nicely said, though I might be interested in working for Crate & Barrel's corporate office if they did meet in a 10-story sofa.  As long as it's right across the street from the Vizio headquarters - which would of course be a 12-story flat panel HD screen.  Sweet.

I'd work late on Mondays during football season.  Clocking out coincidentally right after the Monday Night Football game (assuming the Vizio building gets cable).

I love what reader/commenter adriannakaden said: "I live about 10 minutes away from this building, and I'm sick of having to look at it whenever I go into Newark. Yeah, I know, I know, people are going to say 'Well you don't HAVE to look at it,' but come on guys, it's a huge basket right beside the highway, you can't miss it! It's rediculous looking"

Exactly!  I mean, when you go to the Zoo, you don't HAVE to look at the monkey playing with himself in the middle of the primate cage.  But really, its so ridiculous, you can't help but look.

The next little mistake we talk about is the Page 8 building: The Fang Yuan Building in Shenyang, China.  (photo source)

Bunny said:  "This 25-floor office building, finished in 2001 in the northeastern capital of Liaoning Province, is a weird mishmash of ideas. One is a reference to old Chinese coins, which have square cutouts—just like the structure’s square center. Other parts of the design are like a garden-variety corporate building, with a concrete base and, on the sides, steel rims with glass grooves...Princeton-educated Taiwanese architect C. Y. Lee...wanted to meld East and West. In this creation, urban concrete-and-steel commercial structure meets ancient Chinese currency."

While not exactly a stinging criticism, it gets the point across - this building's design really doesn't exist to make much of a point.  Designing things in the shape of money or monetary symbols is for the designers and creators of Richie Rich (the American-created comic character).

Its a silhouette of ancient Chinese currency, extruded and put on a clumsy (that's being charitable) base that's a split mastaba beneath a stubby skyscraper whose wide faces were designed by Michael Graves in the mid-80s and and whose narrow faces wanted to be like a split Boston Federal Reserve Bank.

The only time a professional building designer should ever be allowed to design a crass, miss-mashed edifice like this one is if the thing is going in Las Vegas

or Dubai

Both these places of obscene carelessness are home to awful built things that must have been conceived in an inebriated, snarky, or practically joking state of mind (maybe all of those).

Now, let me tell you about the 'beauty' of our Page 4 building:  The Harold Washington Library in Chicago, Illinois.

A few years ago, when I was a student visiting Chicago, I was riding the train on Chicago Downtown Loop with a classmate.  As we were passing this visually jarring, huge friggin' building, I turned to take a picture of it saying, "I just had to get a picture of that crazy thing."  In a surprise move, a sweet looking old lady sitting in the seat in front of us turns around and says something along the lines of, “why do you want a picture of that ugly ass thing. Here in Chicago, we hate that piece of shit.”  Wow, tough town.  I'm not sure whether that anecdote says more about the people of Chicago, but its sure as hell says something about the way this building is held in the minds of the people who have the unfortunate luck to live with it everyday.

I guess Chicago's Washington Library is a little like I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramids in that way.

The locals either LOVE it or HATE it.  Its the same, except that all the locals HATE the Washington Library. On this little (a full city-block) mistake of the bull market 90s, Bunny said: "If buildings came with footnotes, this one...would have pages worth of citations.  Neoclassical references collide with a glass-and-steel Mannerist roof; throw in some red brick, granite, and aluminum—and a bad sense of scale—and you’ve got way too much architecture class for one day...The Chicago public library has a helter-skelter application of motifs and styles that’s [unfortunately, completely postmodern.]"

What this means is that the building tries so hard NOT to be something like this:

that it just doesn't have enough time to try and be more like this (i.e. the roof):

not enough time or money to be more like this (i.e. the massing of the base and the lack of distinct ornamentation, imagine about 4 of these in a row and you'd have a nicer base for the library):

and not enough time or class or gonads to be more like this (i.e. the middle parts of both this and the library building are similar but not - and that's not good for the library building, showing lack of vision, ability, and scale).

To sum that up, the Harold Washington Library in Chicago is just, flat-out not good.

And this brings us to the last, and my 'favorite' ass-ugly building.  The Page 2 show stopper: The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea.

A few months ago was when I first heard about this building.  I looked it up and I almost fell out of my seat at its bold, unapologetic ugliness.

This thing is like the ugly duckling that unwisely got out of the lake, got chewed up and spit out by a lawnmower, didn’t die because its guts and bones were just too damn strong, and hobbled around for a time while the other ugly ducks laughed and pecked at it.

Bunny said: "With its concrete sides sloping at sharp 75-degree angles, this stark 1,083-foot-tall, not-quite-finished hotel looks threatening and out of place on the Pyongyang skyline.  Its history is odd, too: the country ran out of money for the project in the early 1990s, and it was airbrushed from photos [for quite some] time. After a 16-year hiatus, construction began anew last year...Supposedly the 3,000-room hotel is an attempt to outdo South Korea when it comes to impressive skyscrapers. It’s undoubtedly emblematic of the ruling dictatorship’s hubris."

 



















Truly, only an egomaniaicle dictator (as if there is any other type) with his own personal waterslide in the pool of his vast estate could ever imagine, sanction, start, stop, and after almost two decades resume building of this thing.  And now that they’re facing most of it in glass (which really doesn't help the looks at all) and trying to finish it, I'm so excited to see this once-damaged ugly duckling transform into a grown up, butt-ugly, cluster-flub of junkiness.  Maybe one day in the future, when Kim Jong Crazy-Leader III decides to have an open and non-hostile dictatorship like China has, I could stay in that hotel and see what it feels like to live in one of the imaginings of a certified nutter.

Well, I guess that's it for that.  Thanks for taking this trans-continental and trans-chronological journey through unfortunate buildings.

In the next blog post, I'll talk about Thanksgiving and why its evidence in the case making America better than any other country on the face of this Earth.

Cheers!

P(L)'s note:  (Edit 11/31/2011) The desire for marginal historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity have precipitated an edit about the Russian apartment block.  Thanks to the blog's commentors for keeping us honest.