The architects behind the world’s biggest and boldest buildings usually have a point to make.
It might be a point about aesthetics, engineering or money. It might be about the architect’s religious devotion or their own genius. Whatever the point, the worst thing that can happen is to be ignored. For many architects and developers, to be boring is a greater sin than to be ugly.
But when a building turns out ugly, it’s the passers-by who pay the price — locals and tourists alike. You can’t hide an ugly building. Instead, divisive architecture calls attention to itself daily, fuelling debate, mocking its critics with its immovability and stirring the souls of those brave outsiders who dare to say, “perhaps this building is special?”
After all, a building isn’t just about the statement but about the passion behind it and the details of the work. So, Buildworld decided to leap into the debate by identifying the most maligned buildings in the U.S, judged by the language that people are using about them on Twitter.
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Here are the ugliest buildings in America:
Image Credit: Ceri Breeze / iStock.
23. Cobo Center
Location: Detroit, Michigan
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 1.95%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
22 Marina Towers
Location: Chicago, Illinois
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 2.33%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
21. Oregon Convention Center
Location: Portland, Oregon
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 2.73%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
20. Hesburgh Library
Location: South Bend, Indiana
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 3.25%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
19. Harold Washington Library
Location: Chicago, Illinois
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design:4.17%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
18. Museum of Pop Culture
Location: Seattle, Washington
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 4.41%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
17. Art Museum
Location: Denver, Colorado
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 4.50%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
16. Mercedes-Benz Stadium
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 7.24%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
15. MetLife building
Location: New York City, New York
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 7.71%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
14. Experience Music Project
Location: Seattle, Washington
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 9.40%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
13. Portland Building
Location: Portland, Oregon
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 9.66%
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
12. Madison Square Garden
Location: New York City, New York
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 11.07%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
11. Wells Fargo Center
Location: Jacksonville, Florida
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 11.48%
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
10. Florida State Capitol
Location: Tallahassee , Florida
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 12.14%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
9. Alamodome
Location: San Antonio, Texas
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 13.23%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
8. Thompson Center
Location: Chicago, Illinois
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 13.91%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
7. US Bank Stadium
Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 15.47%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
6. Trump Tower
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design:17.39%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
5. The Denver International Airport
Location: Denver, Colorado
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 18.31%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
4 .Watergate complex
Location: Washington, District of Columbia
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 18.69%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
3. Verizon Building
Location: New York City, New York
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 19.93%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
2. Boston City Hall
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 25.03%
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
1. J. Edgar Hoover Building
Location: Washington, District of Columbia
% of Tweets Criticising Building’s Design: 37.84%
To see the complete list of the ugliest buildings in the world go to Buildworld.co.uk
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
What We Did: Methodology & Sources
Buildworld curated a long list of buildings from around the world, the UK, and the U.S. that are often said to be ugly. We identified all the design-themed tweets about these buildings on Twitter. Then we used a sentiment analysis tool called HuggingFace to analyze the percentage of tweets that were negative about each building’s design.
We built a seed list of buildings from authoritative rankings of the ugliest buildings worldwide and by country. These included all previous winners and nominees of the UK’s Carbuncle Cup and rankings of the world’s ugliest skyscrapers from Architectural Digest (full list of sources below).
We then searched Twitter for the name of each building plus a set of keywords to obtain all tweets that reflected the public’s opinion regarding its design. The gathered tweets were filtered to ensure they talked about the design of the buildings. We used an AI algorithm from HuggingFace to extract the sentiment from the collected tweets, and then we ranked the buildings based on the percentage of tweets that were negative for each of them.
We added the location of buildings that could not be easily determined by the name alone. For instance, we searched for “Trump Tower Las Vegas” to avoid misleading results. We used the following keywords on the query: ‘design,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘view,’ ‘looks,’ ‘architectural,’ ‘style’, ‘ugly,’ ‘inspired,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘horrid,’ ‘concept,’ ‘aesthetic.’ We did not allow for duplicate tweets, and we only considered up to five tweets from the same account. Some tweets containing specific words were filtered out as well to ensure the majority of the data referred to the building itself.
A tweet was considered negative if its probability of being negative was higher than 50%. The percentage of negative tweets was calculated by dividing the number of negative tweets by the number of total tweets.
The data was collected in October 2022.
This article originally appeared on Buildworld.co.uk and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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