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Washington’s ugliest buildings


Roosevelt Bridge


Glenn Dale Hospital


Association of Auto Dealers


HUD


Lauinger Library


Marymount Ballston

Yesterday’s Post ran a feature about the Washington region’s ugliest buildings. The Post took reader nominations and choose six of its “favorites”. The results are below and at right, along with BeyondDC’s impressions.

  • Roosevelt Bridge: The bridge carrying I-66 over the Potomac River is pretty ugly, but there’s just enough of a place in our heart for exposed structure that we feel like it maybe doesn’t belong on the short list. Also, BeyondDC can’t help but think about that time we tried to cross it on foot to get from the Kennedy Center to Rosslyn. That was a mistake. Don’t try that.
  • Glenn Dale Hospital: The PG County building isn’t so much ugly as run-down. Fix the place up and it would be pretty handsome.
  • Association of Auto Dealers: Tysons Corner is full of terrible architecture, but this is surely the worst of the lot. It combines lazy modernism done on the cheap with pointless brutalism that doesn’t even maintain the intellectual honesty of actual brutalism. Definitely one of the ugliest buildings around.
  • HUD: Speaking of brutalism… blech. The key building of the Southwest DC urban renewal vomitscape was the first thing that came to BeyondDC’s mind when we thought of DC’s worst buildings.
  • Lauinger Library, Georgetown: You know that really pretty spire that’s the defining landmark of Georgetown University? You know that massive concrete bunker in front of it that blocks the view of the spire from the Potomac? Yeah, good call. Brutalism is on a streak here.
  • Marymount University, Ballston Campus: The architectural equivalent of a middle-schooler’s myspace page with so many clashing colors and obnoxious .gifs that you want to run screaming from the room shouting “OW MY EYES!”. Marymount’s building would be an unattractive but unextraordinary example of mid-century modernism if not for the tacky blue color scheme. Honorable mention goes to the building next door, which was just recently completed and, inexplicably, took several design cues from its illustrious neighbor.

What do you think? If we were to construct a top-10, what should we include?

December 22nd, 2008 | Permalink
Tags: architecture



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