The world’s ugliest buildings

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National Library of Kosovo

When you’re an experienced traveler, you learn to appreciate beauty and ugliness alike. After all, any place in the world has its good parts and its bad parts, and no city can be made up entirely of tastefully designed gingerbread houses. After all, that’s the beauty of cities, right? An ugly building will only highlight the beauty of another one, and a bit of diversity is always good…But let’s be real.

Some buildings are so utterly and terribly ugly that no amount of reasoning can make you see their use, and all you can do is wonder why these monstrosities haven’t been torn down yet! So I hereby present you a list of the world’s most hideous buildings, don’t look at the pictures if you’re sensitive :P.

Millenium Dome, London

I completely understand the motivation of the London officials in order to celebrate the new millennium, since it was a pretty big deal a decade ago. However, what I fail to understand is why they had to built this huge dome, which to me looks like an alien flying saucer half buried into the earth with orange spines sticking out of it.

If it was a bit smaller, the dome would have been harder to notice at least – but alas, its the largest of its kind in the world. For reasons that are not difficult to imagine, the dome was not as successful as its creators imagined, and although the exhibitions it hosts are quite good, it has never been popular with the public.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland

Show me a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I’ll be grateful to spend the day gawking at exhibits about most glamorous rock stars of the last century. But this building dims my enthusiasm quite a bit.

The Hall in Cleveland is all good intentions, but very little style, and the overall look of the building is a 5-year old’s imagining of a 30th century building, made out of building blocks. The museum’s exhibition is a delight, and I highly recommend visiting it, but try not to look at the building while you’re still outside it – it might burn your eyes.

Petrobras Headquarters, Rio de Janeiro

The people at Petrobras might have a head for business, but their taste in architecture is rather questionable. The headquarters of Petrobras are located in a popular part of Rio, as befitting one of the world’s larges companies, but unfortunately, the building looks like a crumbling cube made out of Lego, which, frankly, looks like a futuristic high security prison. If you look at satellite pictures of the building, it looks like it’s about to fall into pieces.

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Paris is amazing, and if you avoid the seedy parts of the city (and the industrial parts) you can almost think that all of it is made up of beautifully crafted, elegant buildings. You can even turn a blind eye to Louvre’s infamous glass pyramid and be on your merry way. But then, you come face to face with the towering horror that is Centre Georges Pompidou.

Designed to be a monument of hi-tech architecture, the complex’s unsavory innards of tubing, wires and pipes are exposed for all to see, and a pretty sight they are most definitely not.

The Beehive, Wellington

If you still think o New Zealand as the country of hobbits and elves, pretty houses and majestic castles, here’s something to shatter your dreams a little bit. The Beehive houses one of the branches of the Parliament, and like many official buildings in the world, it missed the mark by a mile.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize what was the inspiration for this evil-looking thing, and I’m sure that the architects meant well, and if the Beehive hadn’t been just next to the Edwardian Parliament House, maybe it wouldn’t even look that bad.

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