The World's Ugliest Buildings

Betsy Schiffman



When the new Austrian Cultural Forum building opened last month in midtown Manhattan, it quickly drew criticism from some of the world's greatest architectural critics: average New Yorkers. While the local and national press have gushed about it, it was the first new skyscraper to be erected in the city since Sept. 11 and was bound to be a lightning rod for controversy.



Designed by Austrian-born architect Raimund Abraham, the tower cost $29 million but only sits on a narrow, 25-foot-wide plot of land. What it lacks in width it tries to make up for in height. Standing 24 stories tall, it looks oddly top-heavy and compressed, as though it were being squeezed by the buildings next to it.

The world is full of ugly buildings. Tenements in Hong Kong, apartment blocks in Moscow, skyscrapers in Tokyo and pretty much all of Budapest and Teheran are blots on the landscape. Rundown, poorly built and deeply dehumanizing as they may be, these buildings were not conceived with any aesthetic pretensions, however. They were meant to be barely functional and were built at minimal cost. Offensive as that might seem, what is even worse is when millions of dollars are spent with the goal of creating a noble edifice and the result is still ugly.

Doubtless some people in Babylonia criticized the ziggurats as "vulgar" or "tacky." Medieval cathedrals also probably had their share of detractors. Buildings are by their very nature public, so they lend themselves more easily to criticism, if not outright rancor. Of course, some architecture, like some art, is not to everyone's taste, nor should it be. In 1984 Prince Charles articulated it best when he said that "some planners and architects have consistently ignored the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people." In the next breath, he called the proposed wing to the National Gallery in London a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved elegant friend."

The buildings on this list were selected because they cost so much and look so awful. While we are sure that we didn't include more than a few buildings that could easily qualify for this list, we think we've done a pretty fair job of picking some real howlers.

But we also had help. We asked architects and critics from the most prestigious firms and schools what they considered to be the greatest architectural atrocities today. Here's what we came up with.