Ugliest Building on Your College Campus?

It is ugly.

This is an abomination.

R2 What the hell were the Baptists doing in Hong Kong?

The University of Cincinnati's Crosley Tower. Hideous inside and out.

Texas Tech has attractive architecture overall. However, some of the modern high-rise buildings built in the 60s and 70s are completely out of place with the rest of the Spanish Renaissance architecture of the earlier buildings. Fortunately, there has been an effort to return to the earlier style on most of the newer buildings built in the last 30 years.

Here's an example of a drab boring high-rise. At the time I was there, it was the College of Business building. I thought the tower looked appropriately like a big calculator.

Wescoe Hall at the University of Kansas.

Ugliest campus building EVAH!

Who the fuck would approve a building with big wall and tiny window? It just look like prison.

The dingy concrete doesn't help either - that makes it even worse.

“Only the best for my campus.”

Northwestern University's main library. Not sure it's the ugliest, but it has to be a candidate. Lol.

Northwestern has a core of beautiful buildings in the old, southern part of campus (e,g,m University Hall, Deering Library, Annie May Swift) and the sorority/south residential quads. Then there's a some nice, but not exceptional buildings. But, then there's the brutalist stuff including the main library. I said on the other thread - none of it is THAT awful in person - it sort of works in context given the natural setting on Lake Michigan and the generally nice landscaping. The "cold" color and sometimes dinginess of the concrete doesn't help.

Hey OP, Pitt might have a few ugly buildings...but it has some great ones like the Cathedral of Learning.

NYU's library is known for being ugly on the inside. Designed by a prison architect so there is no privacy and the floors create an optical illusion to look like spikes that will discourage suicide.

Fuckin' creepy

The Norris Center is at Northwestern is a concrete box with a beautiful lakefront location. I can't understand why it wasn't torn down years ago,

I'm always interested to see what colleges and universities that have a core of traditional and beautiful academic buildings do when they expand and build new buildings. At this point you hardly ever see authentic old-school academic architecture for new buildings. Sometimes new buildings will throw a nod to that with a facade with some recreated architectural details. Other times, they don't try at all and the results vary a lot.

The law school on the Columbia campus. Bad enough now, but before the addition with the green-tinged windows, it was positively Stalinist.

Sir Richard MacCormac's Garden Quandragle. Ersatz "Lost Horizon" deco late post-mod???, and this is a very flattering picture.

I went to the University of Illinois at Chicago, we usually win at this thing.

R14, I was thinking about going with Norris Center. Yeah, that front door look is pretty bad. But, again, in context when I was in school I never thought it was out-of-this-world bad. Maybe because the other side is all windows overlooking the lake and the lakefill (and essentially looks like a nondescript suburban office building). When I was in school in the 1990s the lakefill still had the lagoons and open land - which is now mostly filled with new buildings and official athletic fields.

Lauinger Library, Georgetown University...named after an alumnus killed in Vietnam

I meant to sign R10 to R19.

Yeah, R18, UIUC isn't pretty, but it's like a lot of urban commuter schools - sort of a community college on steroids look. Great location, at least now. It was a little dicey in some directions from the campus when I was at Northwestern.

At least the concrete is clean and bright in that pic, R14.

Harvard’s William James Hall, home of the worlds slowest elevators. By Minoru Yamasaki, famous for his design of the original World Trade Center.

MIT’s student center- almost as ugly as Boston City Hall.

Many would select Harvard’s Peabody Terrace, apartments for married graduate students, but I kind of like it.

R24, that doesn't seem crazy ugly to me. To be sure, it's not striking or beautiful and isn't impressive, but if that's the ugliest building on campus, kudos to MIT.

The Arizona State University Art Museum (of all things) is a concrete bunker.

MIT has tons of utilitarian buildings known by numbers all crowded together. This view shows Frank Gehry’s leaky Stata Center in the middle

R15, Texas Tech has thankfully tried to return to the Spanish Renaissance architecture of the original campus as they've built new buildings recently. But there was a period in the 60s and 70s when the architecture was more modern and less Spanish. I'll post a few examples.

First, the Texas Tech Administration building (one of the original campus buildings built in 1925)

The new English Department building (2002)

The mid-century modern Library building (1962)

Notre Dame's ill-advised venture into 1960's modern architecture.

The Lewis Science Library at Princeton

R14 & R19 —. Another NU alum here; I agree with all the bad late 60s early 70s brutalist SOM buildings being pretty awful. I was there in the early 80s and back then the landscaping was very ratty compared to how the camps looks currently. It was a low point, all the beautiful oder buildings had yet to be restored; Lunt, Swift, Harris and University Hall were all very run down - University mostly had cheap 60s paneling on the walls. The then newest building - the theater interp center next to Norris was even worse - just a blank stucco box. The Library at least tried to be interesting, we referred to it as the Close Encounters mothership and Norris as the box the library came in. And R22 the Norris facade isn’t clean concrete - its limestone cut in huge slabs to look like concrete.

OMG OP, I went there too! What an abomination.

Having to be in those Brutalist buildings in January when it's -20 degrees outside and pitch black at 3:30 in the afternoon - Northwestern could be pretty depressing at times.

Sounds like a few years made a big difference, R24. NU's campus was fairly nice when I was there (1991-95 and lived in Evanston until 1997). By no means perfect, but the landscaping had improved and they had finished or were starting the renovations of old buildings. I totally remember the complete renovation of University Hall - I went to classes in renovated classrooms. But they hadn't developed he lakefill yet - there's so much MORE now, including that global center thing. the athletic administration building, and the new Wirtz performing arts center which sort of looks like a small modern airport terminal. But it must be great from the inside with all that glass right on the lake.

And that's a good point, R36 - it all could be forgiven on a sunny, non-windy, and at least semi-warm day with the lake sparkling. The limestone brutalist buildings were not anywhere as dingy or depressing.

Dang, I keep on forgetting to sign.

Every building here was probably considered beautiful by architects of the day, and architecture critics. Why do they foist this hideousness on the public, when they know how to build lovely buildings.

Jussieu (former Paris-VI) as it looked when I was at Sorbonne (Paris IV), the two now merged, and this monstrosity reclad but no better.

the recladding.

The jarring mixture of styles at Northwestern - including the 3-towered Brutalist library.

R42 - I forgot about that 90s (?) addition to the front of Kresgie. Before it sort of looked like a 50s High School plunked down in the middle of campus. The old forecourt had once had a formal rose garden which was mostly destroyed when they built the two dorms in front of it that all the upperclassmen complained about when I got there - later they got rid of the entire forecourt.

Everything about this University is ugly except some of their buildings.

Not my campus, but UC Davis has the notorious Social Sciences & Humanities Building, aka "The Death Star".

Another brutalist view inside the bowels of the Death Star.

This was and still is considered terrible by many but I like it.

Killam memorial library, Dalhousie university.

That seems pretty benign to me, R47. R48, on the other hand, that really is awful.

The Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University. A Peter Eisenman deconstructivist abomination dropped at the entrance to an otherwise picturesque campus.

That is bad.

R43, the Kresge renovation was later - 2000s or 2010s. I don't think it looks bad, but the old Kresge was more coherent and fit in that location better.

The Humanities building at the University of South Carolina is lacking in humanity.

r12 I never got how the spikes would discourage suicide. Wouldn't spikes be a plus if you wanted to jump?

The balconies and stairs at NYU’s library were originally open. They had to put up fences to stop jumpers.

R48 leaves me speechless. Was the idea behind these buildings that they'd all double as bomb shelters?

The Smith memorial student union at Portland State is dire-looking. Fortunately, the interior isn't so bad, which is surprising. I went to grad school at Fordham, which by contrast has one of the most beautiful campuses I've ever seen (the Rose Hill Bronx campus, that is).

Why not tell us where that is R47

R56 It’s no wonder why so many of these bunker like, windowless buildings are libraries, before the technology to really filter out all harmful aspects of daylight through windows the best hope for protecting collections was eliminating as much of the natural light as possible. Moisture is also detrimental collections too. This coincided with the space race and cold war and a huge influx of money for libraries to be built as a way to increase knowledge and catch up and surpass the Russians. So these temples of knowledge were almost bomb shelter like to protect the knowledge of humanity incase it all went wrong. You see this through out public libraries in the 60s and 70s. The surge of new , primarily public libraries, in the 21st century was to replace these bunkers with new light filled, aesthetically pleasing spaces that had reached their first life spans.

R59 I loved the library at the University of South Carolina. It has two beautiful light filled levels above ground, designed by the same architect as the Kennedy Center. But, they built numerous levels underground to actually house the majority of books.

It has a lot of competition on the Yale campus, most recently the two new harebrained residential colleges, but Sterling Library (1931) presents such a graceless and unwieldy late Neo-Gothic that it deserves a mention.

I'd grown up in a house that was Fauxlonial inside and out. Hated my repeat pattern bedroom wallpaper, Ethan Allen furniture, and room-sized rag rug, all in shades of brown, olive, and beige. So I loved the brutalist architecture I found at Pitt. These are the dorms I lived in, concrete as fuck, with rooms pie-shaped as fuck.

I'm older (I think) than OP or Sylvia Fowler, as I don't remember the building in the OP, but the Towers and the Library were brutality heaven. I don't hate the examples people are showing from Northwestern, and I never minded Government Center in Boston.

Anything modern was better than the Fauxlonial grave I nearly died in.

Are we all humble bragging now? Saint-Jacques at the Sorbonne. So gay, really not up to snuff compared to Oxbridge libraries and the Ivies. The human scale iron structure A.D. White Room at Cornell is lovely. Wait for the follow up...

A.D.White at Cornell

inspired the new art library there. WOW

R61 Same campus and a library, but this time an actual modernist Brutalist bunker clad in marble panels that actual glow with sunlight inside on a bright day. One of the most successful and jewel box like Brutalist buildings showing that it can be well done and beautifully and perfectly suitable for it collections of rare books and manuscripts. The Beinecke.

Massive appendage eating the old arts buildings

R65 & R67 Is this the one with the glass floors for the stacks that the girls wearing skirts complained about because the boys were looking at their underwear? That’s one way to get the (straight) guys into the Art Library!

R66, I was thinking of putting the Beinecke up. Typical of Brutalist and similar architecture (cf. Louis Kahn's British Art Center) in that it's beautiful from the inside, blah from the outside. But its blah is not as bad as the aggressive yech of Sterling.

Maybe it's gender fluid "theys" in "skirtxes" being goggled by other gender fluids.

I don't think the boys and the theys in skirts mind as much being ogled by the boys.

My university was 85% brutalist. On a rainy day I would pretend I was in a Cold War drama.

Someone once told me that the proliferation of bunker-like Brutalist buildings of the 70s on American campuses was a response to the student riots, office invasions, and violence (both real and threatened) that erupted at colleges and universities in the late 60s. Given the thick-headedness of most university administrator types, I'm almost inclined to believe this.

I went to UIC and NU. NU has some beautiful buildings and some hideous ones—its main flaw is lack of any coherent or consistent style. UIC is consistently ugly—and third-rate in all ways.

R73 This off cited article calls it a myth.

I got my Associate's at a community college satellite campus in a dying mall. Next to the computer lab was a Radio Shack.

The school didn't have a dining hall. But if I walked across the parking lot to the little strip plaza, Mr. and Mrs. Yank would feed me for free a their restaurant. I grew up with their son Andy and then he went to Stanford where her played water polo. They were kind to me, but the parking lot was really cold in the winter.

small/ no window = ugly building

R50 looks like a sewage treatment plant.

The Administrative Building at Bowling Green State University. Easily the ugliest building on campus. It's not a good time when you have to go inside, either.

R80 The problem with that list is some of the pictures they use to illustrate it actually do not look that bad.

The entire Chico State campus (TOP PARTY SCHOOL OF SOME YEAR IN THE 80's and legacy of meth and fire in N.California)

The whole campus looked like this (at least in the mid 90's)

University of Toronto Robarts Research Library

[quote] Pitt might have a few ugly buildings...but it has some great ones like the Cathedral of Learning.

Especially the men's rooms on the second and third floor.

Or so I've heard.

The Kiewit Fitness Center at Creighton University. It was built in 1975 by Peter Kiewit, a multimillionaire owner of Kiewit Construction. He was notorious for being cheap and wanted the building completed in a short period of time. Thus his construction company (one of the largest in the world) built a steel building between two residence halls. It looked like a storage building or a manufacturing plant. The building was about a block long and looked awful in the middle of campus. In later years, architects designed structures to be added to the front of the building to hide its hideous design and construction. The corrugated steel on the backside of the building was covered and a lot of trees and plants placed to buffer its appearance.

[quote]University of Toronto Robarts Research Library

In Toronto, the ugly buildings are not confined to the campus grounds.

Those are referred to as the Cathedral of Yearning, r85.

R86 there used to be a way to design campus gyms like armories or rail stations. It could be really charming. There is a somewhat imposing stone entrance, is some kind of gothic, romanesque, or revivalist style, and then a big glass and iron or steel factory-type or "shed" structure behind it. The mixture of industrial and picturesque revivalist is wonderful., IMO. A lot of ivies had gyms like that. Some of them still standing!

R88 It was the Cathedral of Bukkake back in my day, where five or six other students would line up to cover my face with cum.

But I digress. The Nationality Rooms are just stunning, and......

R87 oh definitely, Toronto deserves its own ugly buildings thread. Just keeping to the campus topic. But here's another winner, city hall!

Simmons Hall at MIT, undergrad residences