The World's Ugliest

maxinewarwick — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:05:51 -0600

On the day after we announce San Diego's crop of Orchids & Onions, what do we find on Yahoo's home page?... The world's biggest architectural eyesores!!

Check out their picks here.

A San Diego building doesn't make the list - so obviously our onions aren't that bad!

Ugly Buildings: The Hall of Shame

maxinewarwick — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:48:47 -0500

There's a rash of montrous buildings on the horizon of another great city - London. The blog Gridskipper solicited opinions from some of London's top architects about the monstrosities in their own city.

Though many mention the ego-driven towers that dot the skyline, the biggest offenses seem to come from lazy and uninspired projects.

Sam Jacob, founding director of Fashion, Architecture, Taste summed up what's wrong with many new London buildings in two sentences. "Ugliness isn't an aesthetic," he said, "it's about a meanness, a lack of generosity. In urban planning terms, a grabbing of public resource for private gain."

He thinks a candidate for this crown is St. George Wharf, located on a prime stretch of the Thames riverfront. "These are yuppie ghettos. Designed from the brochure outwards, they bristle with balconies that rubber-neck the river. It's not their greedy maxing out of volume that's the problem. Or the crashing together of economic circumstance (cheap loans, post-industrial rehabilitation, exponential rise in property value). It's the fact that it tries to look nice. That it does 'architectural' things (a touch of modernism, a little dash of High Tech, a dose of Pomo). It's their desire to please that is so despicable. They capture an anemic, generic marketing-led reductiveness. If James Blunt were a building, he'd be these. If they were food, they'd be coffee-chain sandwiches."

Read more comments from other London architects here

ugly

The World's Ugliest

Ugly Buildings: The Hall of Shame