Bad Architecture

Discussion in 'Art & Architecture' started by argentine soccer fan, Feb 24, 2013.

  1. argentine soccer fan

    Staff Member

    Jan 18, 2001
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Club:
    CA Boca Juniors
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    Sometimes you wonder, what are the designers thinking?

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    This building is a beauty. Must be nice to have balconies without doors to enable you to reach them. I suppose you can crawl through the windows. And if they're there for the aesthetic value, it doesn't quite work.

    It's from England.
     
  2. Val1

    Val1 Member+

    Arsenal
    Mar 12, 2004
    MD's Eastern Shore
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    That's English. Here's American.

    images.jpg
     
  3. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    This is more design, but (unless you're a Congressional Republican) this is truly bad...

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    On the good architecture front, I just learned from my landlord that the house we're renting is featured in Old House Journal. I hope he's not planning to raise the rent.
     
  4. argentine soccer fan

    Staff Member

    Jan 18, 2001
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Club:
    CA Boca Juniors
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    I can definitely see a niche market for this concept. Airports, bus stations and the like.
     
  5. Norsk Troll

    Norsk Troll Member+

    Sep 7, 2000
    Central NJ
    Clearly, that is an ADA accommodation for men suffering from diphallia.

    And now, for a truly ugly building - this is going up on the campus of Rutgers Univ.:

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    Dr. Wankler repped this.
  6. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    That looks like a building at a college around here. Is that going to house Rutger's School of Architecture? Because that's what's in the one I'm thinking of.
     
  7. Norsk Troll

    Norsk Troll Member+

    Sep 7, 2000
    Central NJ
    Rutger's Business School, actually. Ironic, given that they were clearly taken to the cleaners by the architects.
     
  8. Dills

    Dills Moderator
    Staff Member

    Philadelphia Union
    United States
    Jun 6, 2006
    Southampton|PA
    Club:
    Philadelphia Union
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    When do they take the scaffolding down? ;)

    A now defunct company - Best Products - had a store/showroom near where I grew up designed by Venturi Scott Brown which was supposedly inspired by a tissue box their daughter had. It was the precursor to the "big box store":

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    A firm I used to work for renovated the building into a medical/office complex, and - although hideous when covering the entire exterior - I'm kicking myself for not snagging some of the panels like coworkers did during demolition. They look pretty sweet as pop art when you have only a few panels.

    Best Products has had some other howlers, too:

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  9. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Nothing says "Best" like simulating a run-down building.
     
  10. guignol

    guignol Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 28, 2005
    mermoz-les-boss
    Club:
    Olympique Lyonnais
    Nat'l Team:
    France
    it would be interesting to have more precise location and dates about the first two!

    the council house is indeed grim, balconies or no balconies. and the balconies are horrid, doors or no doors. to be pleasant a balcony needs a bit of protection from wind and a bit of intimacy; these look as inviting as the yardarm of a sailing ship, especially with the lovely ornate garden they look out on, and the fact that each seems to be shared between two flats.

    [​IMG]

    why balconies but no doors? i love trying to decrypt enigmas like this. first guess that the balconies, which would be poured along with the rest of the floor, were decided against before the building was finished. after all, who would actually go out on them? they would only be used for laundry, and for storing old bikes and other clutter and become eyesores (yes, yes, i know what you're thinking, but at least if the facade stays clean it's not gut-wrenchingly miserable, only mildly inhuman). then why the railings? because if there aren't railings, and someone actually does go out on one, and falls, the estate has a rather obvious attractive nuisance liability. and since the railings had already been ordered...

    which leads me to idea two: when buildings like this are going up, all the material is ordered in lots even before the first brick is laid. and what if no french doors had been ordered? (why is no one shocked by my suggestion that such a thing could happen?) that of course doesn't account for why the windows don't all match... which could be explained a) by them having been replaced piecemeal (the building is of indeterminate age, it could just as well be from the sixties as the noughties) or b) by the building being one of the last of a very large project for which huge quantities of windows were ordered with the same basic dimensions from different suppliers, and this is a collection of the odds and ends left over.

    i have a third idea, which doesn't much square with what i said in no.2 but shares the premise of an early mistake. the facades of buildings generally have to be passed by some kind of urbanism commission, the imprimatur of which being obtained, no modification can be made without resubmitting new drawings. and if the elevations submitted showed the buildings with these inaccessible balconies?
     
    argentine soccer fan repped this.
  11. guignol

    guignol Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 28, 2005
    mermoz-les-boss
    Club:
    Olympique Lyonnais
    Nat'l Team:
    France
    the second building is just a different twist on the same tongue in cheek pseudo-architecture that is seen in the best products stores... which i will try to defend.

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    i agree this scene is ghastly, but the only thing in it that isn't perfectly dreadful... is the store. let's face it, in the peri-urban nightmare of which this scene is only a microscopic sample*, tossed in between the sea of mismatched cars** not even the parthenon or notre dame cathedral would amount to a hill of beans. so why not have a little fun with it? you say that a few panels of this building is pretty good pop art? but in its gargantuan entirety it works too. i would eve say more is better! i think those flowers work wonders. they even give the impression that the proportions of this building are harmonious (which is neither true nor false: the proportions are what they are and obey no golden rule except parcel size and height restrictions). certainly the whimsical colors, the refusal... no, the modest demurral... to look like a building works better, for me at least, than pompous monstrosities of this ilk:
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    oh god...
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    please...
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    make it stop...
    the other best products buildings shown here show the tongue in cheek i was talking about. a couple of them (particularly the tilted wall) show some sohisticated engineering but in the materials used (the same run of the mill "stone" everything seems to have been built of in the last 40 years, a couple even seem to be made of plain old cinder blocks), they all respire the same arte povera and whatever quality they have comes only from the originality of an impish idea. an impish idea doesn't get you far, naturally, but faced with the mission impossible i described what can you hope for?

    but maybe there's more than just humor at work? maybe a deadly serious meditation on the vanity of our buy now buy more later society? portraying these stores as ruins, just like the fake ruins of the "follies" of every self-respecting XVIII century english garden? the same is in hubert robert's proto-romantic view of the grand gallery of the louvre (which he had designed, and which was still abuilding):

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    vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

    *and which is conquering france as surely as it has the US, if you're interested and can read la langue de moliere, this article is excellent.
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    **some individual cars are very attractive... when new. dirty and beatup, much less so. but unless you're at the concours d'elegance at pebble beach, i defy you to say that a field full of automobiles can ever be anything but grotesque... and the average walmart parking lot is not pebble beach.
     
    song219 and Dr. Wankler repped this.
  12. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Hubert Robert rep, in case you're wondering. Art Institute of Chicago has a few of his huge paintings. I'd spend upwards of an hour looking at one of them (longer if I wasn't there on free day).
     
  13. song219

    song219 BigSoccer Supporter

    Apr 5, 2004
    La Norte
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Vanuatu
    When I saw these pictures I thought, "Oh you must live near me." But I realized I've seen this generic architecture in various locations between Delaware and Texas. Not that I'm slamming a particular region, but that area I've been in enough to see these a bunch of times.
     
  14. guignol

    guignol Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 28, 2005
    mermoz-les-boss
    Club:
    Olympique Lyonnais
    Nat'l Team:
    France
    you can keep on going from texas all the way to california.

    on a visit a few years ago to a midwestern region which it serves no purpose to name i was struck by the legotude of the towns: the same grid of streets, with the n/s ones numbered, the e/w ones names either for one or more of 1) trees 2) presidents 3) other states.

    in one city hall is on 2nd and elm, in the other on 6th and jefferson. the shells, burger kings, targets and walmarts seem placed in the order they were taken out of the box. then everything is put back in the box and taken out to make the next town.

    i have no problem with the first part, but the second depresses me to no end.
     
  15. The Potter

    The Potter Member+

    Aug 26, 2004
    England
    Club:
    Stoke City FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    This building could be from anywhere in England so ubiquitous are the materials and the design (we also have a great love of nets for some reason), never seen balconies before though.
     
  16. feverrush

    feverrush New Member

    Apr 12, 2013
    Club:
    Manchester City FC
    I'm sure some people love this.
     
  17. argentine soccer fan

    Staff Member

    Jan 18, 2001
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Club:
    CA Boca Juniors
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    I asked my friend who took the picture, and she told me it's actually from Wales, near Swansea University.

    Speaking of obnoxious architecture, see if you can guess which of the following buildings from downtown Buenos Aires is known by the locals as "El Rulero" (the hair curler).

    [​IMG]
     
  18. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
  19. argentine soccer fan

    Staff Member

    Jan 18, 2001
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Club:
    CA Boca Juniors
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
  20. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
    Chicago Fire
    Well, we could bomb it, but judging by the article, we'd just be doing them a favor.
     
  21. RichardL

    RichardL BigSoccer Supporter

    May 2, 2001
    Berkshire
    Club:
    Reading FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    I'm not keen on the other two pics, but I can live with this kind of architecture for out of town shopping centres, mainly because the alternative is normally a line or corrugated steel warehouses that look dismal.

    It can certainly be a pastiche style, and boring when overdone repetitively, but it does at least show a desire to consider aesthetics rather than just function. Give it a bit of time to get the trying-too-hard flamboyance out of the system, and they might actually start to have such places which look agreeable.


    I remember seeing those exact photos for the Best stores in a magazine around 30 years ago. While the results might not always be appreciated by everyone, I'll always applaud an architect for trying to make modern buildings that look interesting.
     
  22. KCFutbol

    KCFutbol Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 14, 2001
    Overland Park, KS
    Club:
    Kansas City Wizards
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    A number of years ago I was doing a site visit to a high school in order to estimate the cost of the renovations.

    I was inspecting a restroom which was going to undergo extensive renovations. I opened what I believed to be the HC toilet partition. Imagine my surprise when I discovered two water closets inside a single toilet partition.
     
  23. KCFutbol

    KCFutbol Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 14, 2001
    Overland Park, KS
    Club:
    Kansas City Wizards
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    In case you'd like to purchase one.
     
  24. guignol

    guignol Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 28, 2005
    mermoz-les-boss
    Club:
    Olympique Lyonnais
    Nat'l Team:
    France
    yes, but those are quite different. they're only meant to put flower pots on, and whether they're to your taste or not, add a decorative flourish. but the ones in the OP are clearly nothing of the sort.
     
  25. Alberto

    Alberto Member+

    Feb 28, 2000
    Northern, New Jersey
    Club:
    New York Red Bulls
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    What would Venturi say? This is certainly a duck or in this case a basket. Architecture as a basket case. A bad one liner, architecturally speaking.
     

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