Worst buildings in your home town

[Mulefisk 15]

addax61024: I really like that seccond one. A great example of 60's brutalism.

The rest of the buildings in you pics are horrible though EDIT: Page 2!!

[Micah 16]

quote>

Is it just me or does that photo look like a model of a town instead of a real town? (I think it is a model).

[IDS2 3,436]

Hehehe....Minneapolis has some of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen. For instance, International Market Square and the Hennepin County Federal Building downtown. And in St. Paul, probably the Minnesota Business Academy. Oh, and you have to admit, the Hilton Crowne Plaza Hotel in Brooklyn Center is right up there with the rest.

International Market Square:

Federal building:(not too ugly)

If these pictures take too much space I will delete them.They are links...

[addax61024 6]

Micah, it's a real housing estate. The picture was taken from a developers website, whom I can only assume wanted to change the sky (badly imo) to make the houses look more attractive

[Odainsaker 2,137]

All those big box retailers, strip malls, fast food franchises, and other highway roadside rash typical of suburbia are pretty ugly.

However, when it comes to important architecture, I am very miffed by famed architect Ricardo Legorreta's San Antonio Central Library.  It's not all bad, and I admire Legorreta's many other works in and around Mexico, but well, look at the picture...



What was he thinking?  The inside of building with its central courts and atrium are nice and all, and the massing with its playful primitive sculptural forms in primary colors are fun, but the streetscape is an urbanist's nightmare.  Talk about killing any chance of comfortable streetlife.  If you are not smart enough to find the woefully uninspiring entrance nook, then I guess you shouldn't bother with the literary arts.   The fortification of our civic institutions against the public reaches a new low.  Though there is a tradition of fortified compounds and heavy brutal massing in Mexican architecture, I don't think it was the right move here.  That no one can be on this sidewalk without looking like an dangerous indigent just makes the parking lot screenwall even more scaleless and inhumane.  Amusingly, the greatest public outcry on this building was the bold "enchilada red" color of the exterior, although I actually believe the color works and looks strikingly great on the skyline.

For comparison, here is the same street corner, but with an earlier building, the city's 1930's Sears Store.



What a difference!  Believe it or not, but there is no sexy architecture going on here...its a very straightforward commercial building with some muted style decoration.  No guessing where the doors are here, and there are even cars and people on the sidewalk!  Granted, the neighborhood has changed, and one building can't undo decades of urban neglect, but it was not necessary to totally reject the public space the way the library did.

Both these images came from Paula Allen's San Antonio:  Then and Now.  Like all then-and-now city pictures books, it interesting to the see the radical contrasts.  Somewhere, I had a Tokyo: Then and Now, which was truly mindboggling in the changes (and it only covered up to the 1960s), though the text was fully in Japanese.

[StegSC 40]

Originally posted by: dsl4c Portland, Oregon's "The Portland Building" by Micheal Graves in 1982, who now designs stuff for Target.. quote>

I feel like the only person in the world who thinks that is a beautiful building

[skyliner22 16]

Somewhere, I had a Tokyo: Then and Now, which was truly mindboggling in the changes (and it only covered up to the 1960s), though the text was fully in Japanese.

quote>

that's because Tokyo had to recover from the firebombing raids of 1945 and with all the destruction, came rise to new higher skycraper living. Tokyo also had to rebuild its self in 1923 after the Great Kanto Earthquake, its a tough city any way its destroyed, it will always come back bigger and better!

[seemurray2 21]

Here is one from my hometown, Tulsa - it's the Cityplex Towers, the tallest of them is over 600ft tall, and they are nowhere near downtown... which could be a good thing in this case

[Alakazam 3]

I've got an brutalist office building in my town (No windows and all in concrete). It's only two story high, but the fact that it's horribly large and DIRECTLY in front of the St-Lawrance River makes it an abomination.

I mean, it's horrible. They wasted like one kilometer square of great scenic terrain to put a damned brutalist office building.

But my town is like that. The economic and birth boom occured in this period so the town is full of brutalist building (including the largest tower which is also in front of the river.)

[ILL Tonkso 1,239]

It will be my hometown next year so, 20 Fenchurch Street

45 stories of vomit.

[Peripherypro 0]

 I can't believe you guys are complaning, just look at this! The Centralized Science Laboratory Building right in the core of my university! They say that the colors represent the colors emitted by the elements in the peroiodic table and we'll soon get used to this 'breakthrough in the arts". Everytime I see this building I can't help but cry.

[addax61024 6]

I just found this one and I thought it deserved a mention. Swan House in Newcastle.

[Denon333 0]

My homeland's buildings are all interesting.I think the worst or the building that needs revetilization is our Tanjong Pagar Rail Station.The pic is in this website: http://sg.images.search.yahoo.com/images/view?back=http%3A%2F%2Fsg.images.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3Fp%3DTanjong%2BPagar%2BRailway%2BStation%26ni%3D18%26ei%3DUTF-8%26fr%3Dyfp-t-web%26fr2%3Dtab-web%26xargs%3D0%26pstart%3D1%26b%3D1&w=500&h=314&imgurl=static.flickr.com%2F2065%2F2383642715_93c997ccd6.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fqimaoyi%2F2383642715%2F&size=117.3kB&name=Tanjong+Pagar+Railway+Station&p=Tanjong+Pagar+Railway+Station&type=JPG&oid=f4d33f0161b73342&fusr=QIMAOYI&tit=Tanjong+Pagar+Railway+Station&hurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fqimaoyi%2F&no=9&tt=128&sigr=11gb0enkm&sigi=11g70a52m&sigb=14c4hcap5&sigh=1155dvkah

[Odainsaker 2,137]

Wow, this was an old thread, but its revival is timely enough for me to show my new great dislike from downtown San Antonio:

AT&T Buildings engulfing the old Texas Theater facade.

This is Houston Street looking east, and at the center we see the preserved facade segment of the former Texas Theater.  When completed in 1926, the Spanish Rococo moviehouse along the river was among the largest and most grandiose in the city, and together with the nieghboring Majestic, Empire, and Aztec theaters, would form the heart of downtown entertainment.  The silent movie "Wings," which was shot in the San Antonio area, would first premiere at the Texas Theater, and then released nationally to become the first ever winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture.  However, times change, and downtown moviepalaces across America would decline until by the 1970s they faced near extinction.

The Texas Theater fell into the hands of RepublicBank of Dallas, which, after outrunning and outgunning local preservationists, demolished most of the theater in 1983 in order to construct a new downtown corporate complex.  Only the front entry facade was spared, gutted and fused into the side of one of the new buildings.  The 3-building office complex straddling the Riverwalk was planned to have a 30-story main tower, but RepublicBank failed two years later, finishing only two smaller office towers, which would bounce from Southwestern Bell to SBC Headquarters until today are now AT&T Buildings.  It's really not AT&T's fault for building this soulless target for urban preservationists' anger, but I do wish they could have taken it with them this year when they relocated their executive offices to Dallas.

As Dallas corporate architecture, the AT&T Buildings are just utterly 1980s nondescript bland.  Even in this picture, the scaleless, pink granite office blocks fade uninterestingly into the background.  When overriding preservation boards and approving demolition, the City Council had been suckered by promises of bringing in corporate powerhouse jobs in an era of national stagflation.  Too bad the bank failed (I think Bank of America owns its remnants), and today's downtown San Antonio is realizing its strength and attraction has always been in preserving its own history.  Thankfully, the Majestic, Empire, Aztec, and Alameda have been rescued and restored.

[rawr APPLES 15]

The Ren Centre in Detroit..ew. Doesnt go with the rest of the city at all

[Alexzero77 3]

The sole reason I can't sleep at night.

[gabetx 1]

These buildings are horrible!!! They take the cake for this thread! They are located in Albany, NY

They look like big concrete blocks stretching into the sky!

[NYfanatic 1]

hey I live in albany, NY and their not bad, its the only towers we got

[MooMix1 2]

Boston, Massachusetts (Not quite my town, but 10 minutes away)

Yep, ain't she a beauty? Ha!

[nickzou 1]

Wow, Simtropolis really hates Le Corbusier...

[HuskerDude 12]

Believe it or not, this is a cathedral here in San Francisco:

[Eʟᴇᴍᴇɴᴛ 273]

Come to Ottawa, lots of ugly buildings.

Last but not least...

[Jay Ess 15]

eww...

oh wait... what did i just do... thats my school... its only ugly on the inside

no. actually, there's a big abandoned building in downtown and it is so ugly. it would even be ugly if it was in good shape:

ugliest building in detroit..

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@seemurray, Ill tonkso and peripherypro - i agree those are pretty ugly...

[villagemayor 0]

elemented9, the last pic is actually not bad I like that building. Its not modern and has a lot of detail in the architecture that is rare today. I am not sure if its a historic building but it looks good.

[Circeus 0]

It's the old Michigan Central Station, Detroit, and I think it is a magnificent building. Beaux-arts/Art deco/art nouveau skyscraper are some of my favorite buildings.

[nofunk 1,935]

What?!  Michigan Central Depot would be a beautiful building if it were restored! (Quite honestly, I think it's beautiful even now in its deteriorated state.) Besides, if you want to pick on Detroit buildings, there are plenty of other examples of bad architecture:

The Pontchartrain Hotel. It currently has plywood covering a few missing panels.

Photo courtesy of MarkinDetroit.

1001 Woodward, which I find ugly more because it replaced a beautiful beaux arts skyscraper designed by Daniel Burnham in 1896.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Cobo Hall. It might have been great architecture when it opened in 1960, but today it just looks dated.

Photo courtesy of DecoJim.

[charactersnotpermitted 3]

Although considered a landmark in my hometown, i'm not surprised that this was a nomination for Britains Ugliest Building...