Well, I don't have to refer to any stinking guides. Though I avoid posting straightforward photos of ugly buildings -- why spread suffering? -- I've picked the ugliest from photos here (7 for now*, maybe more after my stomach's settled).
First up, to the left, on 6th Ave. near Vandam. The building on the left aspires to Class on the first floor, then slumps into an Edge City Budget facade as it rises, and finally erupts in a splashy crown of sheet metal pipes combed over the bleak bald lumps on its head -- designed to suggest labor camp cottages downwind of a Hershey's factory? From West Side Eyesores.
To the right, the Trump Soho at Varick & Spring. It takes some doing to make a reflective building this ugly, and it's even worse close up. The cutouts / lumps that define the building give it the look of an evil robot, and every time I look at them I think of people inside the lumps remarking "Hey! We're inside one of those lumps!" From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2.
To the left, the World Financial Center, on the Hudson west of the World Trade Center site. This is the most flattering shot you can take of the complex.Its surface looks like brown plastic mailing tape, and the "grand entrance" on the complex's south side should come with a warning that -- like Lot's wife leaving Sodom -- bad things will happen if you take a good look at it. From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1.
To the right, on 31st St. off 5th Ave. It's the top of this building that's ugly -- they replaced the original, ornate top with something that looks like a cinder block septic tank with windows, or a prison-issue shaved head. It's part of a shortsighted, cheapskate trend that's stripped cornices and ornamentation off way too many old NYC buildings.It's especially cruel since this building was the original home of Life Magazine, and the now-naked top was full of bachelor apartments that served as the magazine's "esthetic maternity ward."
To the left, the orange building on the right, which sits at 34th St. and Park Ave. South, is pretty putrid. (Meanwhile the green Tyvek, exposed for 3 years now, makes the building it covers on the left look better.)
To the right: Almost any NYU dorm could make an Ugly list, including this one on 14th St. just west of 3rd Ave., where there are more ugly NYU dorms.Education is big business, and ambitious self-serving colleges devour their host cities; NYU warehouses its students in hulks so thoughtless they practically spit on their surroundings.
To the left, architect Karl Fischer's heinous 20 Bayard, on McCarren Park in Williamsburg. On the left in the picture, what must have been Karl's inspiration.The building's empty clock face, its vaguely Transformers shape and puny robot head, the kitchen slicer & dicer entrance... It all adds up to make 20 Bayard The Ugliest Building in NYC if not the world.
Note that I have improved and used this monster a few times: 20 Bayard a la Frank Gehry; 20 Bayard a la Rick James.
* Note that when it comes to Ugly in NYC, this is just the tip of the sh*tberg. There's an endless supply, but just a few reasons the buildings exist:
- Developers and their architects don't care how their unsightly pile of crap affects others -- they would put up a 5 story used cardboard box if they could get away with it. This is where crapitecture [Queens Crap] and the Budget Hotel Look comes from, and it likely accounts for 90% of the ugly buildings in NYC.
- They may care a little, but they are inept. Humble or arrogant, with their student architect cousin or a million dollar "starchitect," the developer is blind to the difference between wearing an ugly shirt once in a while and planting a massive, ugly building that poisons its surroundings for decades.
