There are the top 10 ugliest buildings in the world which you may not know but are hungry to discover. As ugly as they may be in their various locations, they have their own unique structures that distinguish them apart from what is common or what is expected.
In this article we shall be treating each of these 10 ugliest buildings in the world. However the truth is, some of these world’s ugliest structures are places we may be familiar with but that we look with wonders. The Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh was found to be the ugliest building in the world according to Twitter users.
The post-modern campus is described as an “indecipherable jumble of forms” with frequent maintenance issues blamed on its architecture and no satisfying viewing angles. J. Edgar Hoover Building, the headquarters for the FBI, comes in a close second.
In 1965, it was the most expensive government building ever in the U.S. Sentiment around its controversial design, featuring an open-air, trapezoidal courtyard and bronze-tinted windows set in a concrete frame, has gradually soured over the years.
Other highlights include Ryugyong Hotel, otherwise known as the “Hotel of Doom” located in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang,” and the fabric-roofed Denver International Airport which has been subject to a number of conspiracy theories over the years pointing to the Freemasons and Illuminati.
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1. Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral
According to Travel + Leisure, when this cathedral opened in 1967, mosaic tiles started falling off and the roof started leaking. Talk about a terrible first impression. Those spires don’t exactly invite people in, either.
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2. Scottish Parliament
Opening three years later than planned and four years after the death of its architect, the Scottish Parliament Building leads the list of global buildings considered to be awful. The project was unpopular from the start, as a national building designed by a foreign architect that quickly spiraled ten times over budget and way beyond its deadline.
The building looks out of place in the Scottish landscape, apart from its unwelcoming entrance, which is “dark and gloomy, particularly in our climate” and “feels like a cave,” according to former MP and chair of Glasgow’s Festival of Architecture and Design, Des McNulty.
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3. North Korean Doom Hotel
The exception is a North Korean skyscraper nicknamed the “Hotel of Doom,” which remains unused 35 years after construction began (although it was more or less completed in 2018). The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang got its nickname during a long building lull and looks moderately less doomy now it has metal and glass cladding and LED lights.
Its tapered, pyramid shape was a costing solution — the hotel is made of cheap but heavy concrete — but the shape, scale and cladding are a sinister sight over Pyongyang’s otherwise modest and mundane skyline.
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4. Morris A. Mechanic Theatre
The city of Baltimore demolished the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre in 2015, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t get a ton of flak for it until then – especially because it sat, abandoned, for 10 years.
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5. Lincoln Plaza
The 31-story luxury apartment that was bestowed the honor of the 2016 Carbuncle Cup is actually quite luxurious – boasting a health club, private movie theater and four story winter garden for its residents to take advantage of. Yet its jutting design irks architecture critics.
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6. J. Edgar Hoover Building (Big Box)
Over one-third of tweets about the J. Edgar Hoover Building are negative in sentiment. And yes, it’s not pretty — but there’s a certain Minecraft-y charm about the blocky brutalist monolith. The FBI HQ was fashionable, practical and even a little utopian when it was designed in the 1960s (an open courtyard for agents to eat lunch, files safely archived deep in the core of the building). But today, its very bulk evokes the worst of 20th-century politics and the 21st-century surveillance state.
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7. Aoyama Technical College
This Japanese university building has been likened to a Transformers character on more than one occasion. According to the university’s website, the building consists of “essential architectural elements – posts, water tank, lightning rods, and joints of various kinds…It represents a new order, not achieved through simplistic control from above, but through tolerance of chaos.
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8. Experience Music Project, Seattle
Avant-garde architect Frank Gehry knows that the Experience Music Project, a rock music museum, isn’t exactly pleasing to the eye: “I look at a lot of buildings and consider them ugly. Most of them, in fact,” he told The Seattle Times in 1999. Well, that’s one way to talk about your life’s work.
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9. Newport Railway Station
Some people think Newport Railway Station looks like a sci-fi snail shell and that seen from the sky it looks like a giant gleaming set of ovaries. The structure, which was built in 2010 and has recently become the second busiest railway station in Wales, is the third ugliest building on the planet. Newport is an old town, and they are trying their best to change it, but this was not suitable for the town and uninviting.
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10. Elephant Building
Completed in 1997, the Elephant Building in Bangkok is one of the most iconic features of the city but it also ranks among the ugliest structures in the world. It is supposed to resemble an elephant.
