Behold: the proposed Donald J. Trump Presidential Library coming in for a landing on Biscayne Boulevard, Miami a few years hence. It is already catching a lot of TDS flak, and deservedly so, for its gilded grandiosity — including a gigantic golden statue of “47” himself inside somewhere, and the gold “Trump” brand logo plastered on the 47th floor. Mr. Trump has always been a comedian, and this monument is, at least partly, a bit of trollery against his millions of hate-inflamed detractors, a 47-story middle finger (with a smile). All of that is too self-evident to belabor.

Don’t expect this library to house many books, either. Rather, the building is a combo temple / museum, filled with artifacts and objects of worship, like the jumbo jet (of various Air Force Ones) to be installed in the ground floor entrance.

The more curious aspect of this project is its manifestation as a skyscraper. Such megastructures are just now going obsolete all over the world, and the world is stuck with them. Working from home, or the corner cafe, or just about anywhere, killed the need for organizing office work in this manner, and artificial intelligence is apt to sweep away countless middle-management, information handling jobs in any case. Another skyscraper is just not what the world needs these days.

So, you’d also have to ask: aside from exhibit halls, study rooms, and auditoriums, what the heck else is expected to occupy the many other floors of the building? Document storage makes more sense in low-slung structures (filing cabinets are heavy) or underground, with elaborate climate-control. Is the plan to offer some upper floor market rental space to companies who might want to locate at a “prestige address?” But, we’ve already established that the traditional office milieu is on its way out.

The answer probably is that building skyscrapers is just what DJT did in life, besides being president of the USA twice. It’s what he knows how to do, and this scheme reflects on the triumphs of his prior career in real estate development. Really, it’s just another Trump Tower, perhaps, ultimately, another Trump hotel for folks who want to bask in the glow of the Golden Golem of Greatness and his legendary doings. The final joke is that it’s being financed with the awards from the various lawsuits Mr. T has won against the old legacy media giants who defamed him over years. For all that, we say GO, MAGA. . . !

Eyesore of the Month is sponsored by Sage Restoration.

Behold the Tour Montparnasse, 59-stories, 689-feet high, built in 1969-1973 during the presidency of Georges Pompidou (yes, he of the inglorious Pompidou Center across the River Seine). Note that there is nothing like it in the neighborhood. Curiously, the hidden hand behind its development belonged to American real estate poobah Wylie F. Tuttle, who enlisted a consortium of 17 French insurance companies and seven banks in the project to get Europe’s then tallest skyscraper built. Minister of Culture, André Malraux at first opposed the idea, then folded under pressure and approved a permit for the monstrosity. The joke goes that the view from the tower is the most beautiful in Paris because it’s the only spot from which the tower can’t be seen. It has also been called the box the Eiffel Tower came in.

Now, more than a half century later, the thing is getting a bit worn. The surrounding shopping mall district, spanning about 22-acres, was hemorrhaging tenants and had become the campground haunt of homeless migrants. Something had to be done! Starchitect Renzo Piano was hired to rescue it — though there was plenty of sentiment to raze the goshdarn thing altogether.

The tower itself is getting a $700-million “skin-job” — the monkeyshit brown original cladding changed-out for shiny mirrored glass, with an underskirt of hanging gardens on the lower ten floors in a nod to the still ongoing “green” mania. The surrounding shopping mall — a typically American-style urban blunder — is due to be replaced by a network of “typical Parisian streets” fronted by shops in the normal manner.

Hence, the tower supposedly gets a new lease on life, reviled as it may be as a freak. But then here we are on the threshold of Artificial Intelligence cutting its awesome swathe through the office workplace. After 2021, the Great Covid-19 Op savaged office occupancy in Europe just as it did in America, with so many employees working-from-home. All that vacancy played hell with commercial real estate. A-I is looking like the coup de grâce for the office skyscraper now, threatening to eliminate vast categories of corporate employment per se. Let’s face it: Europe is not doing a stellar job of anticipating what the actual future might bring. Anyway, nice try. (Below: the tower before and after its fix-up.)

Below: a close-up rendering of the “green” terrace to come. Note a couple of curious things: no fence or guard-rails at the edge. Hmmmm. . . . Also notice how thin the roof is. Do you really suppose it could support the growth of mature trees? I’d say, not a chance. What are they thinking?

Eyesore of the Month is sponsored by Sage Restoration.

Behold: This exercise in ultra-woke-techno-narcissism for the Chicago lake-front is called (variously) Eden Rise or Sky Droplet by Yanko Design. It is supposed to be a “vertical farm skyscraper.” The promotional literature says it all:

A skyline where fresh lettuce grows a few floors above your head, rainwater is harvested from the clouds, and the architecture itself works quietly to heal long standing urban inequities. This project dares to ask a radical question. What if skyscrapers did not just house people, but fed them?

At the heart of this proposal lies a deeply human problem. Food deserts. Across Chicago, many low income neighborhoods struggle to access affordable, nutritious food. Grocery stores are scarce, fresh produce is often out of reach, and fast food becomes the default not by choice, but by circumstance. These conditions have fueled health disparities and reinforced socio economic divides for decades. Rather than treating this as a policy issue alone, the project reframes it as an architectural opportunity.

Note: The proposed site for this prank is the most affluent neighborhood in Chicago. Hardly a food desert. The actual “low income neighborhood(s)” are miles away on city’s south side and west side. Now, imagine the cost of “farming” inside a building, the electricity for grow-lights, for running the water pumps, and probably an army of farmhands to manage all the plants, the hypothetical crops they might produce, and the technology itself. Imagine the complexity of the system and the many failure points entailed. Imagine a water leak on the 63rd floor.

Consider that this is why farming is best practiced outdoors, on the horizontal plane, on dirt. . . with rain. Consider, too, that Chicago is in the Midwest, surrounded by the world’s best farmland, and how easily food can be transported across the Midwest’s flat terrain, by rail especially, from farm to market.

If you really want to solve the “food desert” problem, try asking why the problem exists. For instance, how does epidemic shoplifting break the business model of a supermarket?

Thanks to John Kane for the nomination!

Eyesore of the Month is sponsored by Sage Restoration

Presenting, in honor of Nicolás Maduro, El Helicoide — or the Helix — in Caracas, Venezuela, the regime’s temple of pain. . . a prison and torture facility run by the National Intel Service of Venezuela,

Wikipedia sez: “Its construction was undertaken by a private company during the government of then-president Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1956, designed by the architects Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez. The project was to have included 300 boutiques, eight cinemas, a heliport, a 5-star hotel, a park, a club of owners and a show palace on the seventh level. The building would include a four-kilometer long ramp spiraling around the structure itself, allowing vehicles to enter the building and park inside.”

Weren’t those the good old days? Wannabe hyper-consumerism! So quaint! The project was exhibited as a triumph of modernist design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Salvador Dalí offered to decorate the interior.

Alas, it was soon cancelled, abandoned, and just sat, a dreary vacant dirt and cement ziggurat, inhabited by squatters, for more than a decade. In 2010, it was turned into the headquarters of the National Experimental Security University dedicated to training state police forces. You kinda wonder what kind of experiments they were running in there. From there, the experimental techniques that proved successful were applied to the ongoing political situation, and the prison / torture facilities were added. ¡Ahí lo tienes!

In various revolts, coups, rebellions over the years, the building has suffered bomb damage, but none of that has improved its outward appearance. What’s next for this fabulous building, with Sr. Maduro on his way to a life sentence in some federal slammer. My bet: a super-hyper-casino! Yeah, go for it! Sports book where they used to do the waterboarding! Three cheers for adaptive re-use!

Behold, the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Exposition Park, Los Angeles. Of course the darn thing had to look like a space ship, because George Lucas made the very $5.3-billion fortune that enabled him to aggrandize himself in this museum on the space movie franchise Star Wars. The 300,000 square-foot building contains 35 galleries and two movie theaters. Note the “environmental” roof-scape! What’s that narrative? Answer: The “green” roof is there simply to mollify the climate zealots on the LA planning board and allow Hollywood bigshots to enjoy their luxury-belief boost. It does furnish a clue, though, to the ironic heart of George Lucas’s story as a movie mogul: the guy really doesn’t know how to tell a story.

No, really, he can’t. The Star Wars saga is largely incoherent and has only gotten worse with each iteration. Lucas doesn’t really understand the function of dramatic action in narrative art. Here’s how you can tell: he marches characters onstage to babble about things that happened in the past. Then you get a big battle scene, a lot of visual effects dazzle and violence. Then another character traipses onstage to babble some more about things that happened long ago. That’s George’s understanding of narrative art, which is to say, he doesn’t understand it. By the way, Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings movies) has exactly the same problem. George’s museum building doesn’t tell a coherent story about architecture, either. It’s just another visual effect.

Prediction: by year 2035, The museum will be converted into a homeless shelter.

Thanks to Deborah Bachner for the nomination!

Behold, the “Sky Stadium” announced by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the latest jazzy edition to their utopian “smart city” project known as The Line or NEOM — an $8-trillion, 105-mile-long megastructure composed of two 1640-foot-high mirrored slabs that enclose a creamy nougat center of jungly foliage and water features integrated with apartments, offices, schools, and (of course) shopping. It’s completely insane, you understand. The Line was first featured on this site in August 2022. Three years on, the project is buckling under the weight of its psychotic grandiosity. Here’s a cross-section of the The Line’s beginning at the Persian Gulf:

Here’s another schematic angle on The Line to appreciate how it shoots straight out into the Arabian Desert:

The 46,000-seat Sky Stadium will be perched 1,150-feet up and is slated to be completed in time for the 2034 Fifa football (soccer) World Cup. The initial A-I generated renderings at the top of the page show it suspended on a skyscraper above a sprawling city, but it is actually designed to be “nested” somewhere between the two slabs of The Line.

First announced in 2017 as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 diversification push, The Line was envisioned as a futuristic “cognitive city” with vertical urbanism, AI integration, 100-percent renewable energy (solar power), and 95-percent land preservation of its barren surroundings in the Tabuk province, “for nature.”

Dunno about you, but I’d be a little nervous about watching a soccer game 1,150-feet above the desert floor. Sounds like a super-gigantic version of one of those Sky Bridge” failures of the 1990s, where a mere hundred drunken people swilling margaritas collapse a hanging architectural folly in a Shopping Mall. We’ll stand by for the halftime show there.

Shout out to Warren McEwan for nominating this humdinger !!!

You probably can’t tell whether this is the alien itself or the ship it landed in. Possibly both at the same time. Hard to distinguish the tentacles from the portholes or the eye-sockets, while the salmon-pink folds and creases have a certain gynecologiocal feeling. In any case, this beast landed in Xalapa, capital of Veracruz state, Mexico. It is called Casa de los Milagros or House of Miracles by architect Danilo Veras Godoy and is a private residence, not an intergalactic freight transport vehicle / organism.

As a technical matter, this is an extreme case of what you get when a building is designed from the inside-out, without a whole lot of concern for the pattern language of the building culture in your civilization — and Mexico has quite a good one, starting with the Colonial Baroque of the post-Cortez era. That interesting mashup of the Aztec residue with Spain of the Inquisition is what you see in the dancing skeletons of our time, five hundred years later. It must have been a daunting task to manage the place back then. (An early Mexican viceroy described his philosophy of government as: Do little and do it slowly.)

In any case, this “house” stands in what appears to be subtropical cloud-forest, not a street with its demand for civic decorum. It can be whatever it wants, and it apparently wants to be something like the leftovers on a vivisection table.

Below, a glance at the main entrance / exit staircase with its side-by-side slide. Yes a slide! (For playfulness!) Looks like it would be a pretty hard landing at that angle. Ouch! Call my abogado! The joke ends up being on the home-owner. As usual.

Shout-out to Rick Darby for the nomination.

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The old ten-story Hedrick Building (erected 1928) at St. Mary’s and Martin Streets in downtown San Antonio gets a severe facial to take off the make-up applied sometime in the early 1960s. Note the revealed, original, intricate “Spanish Baroque” detailing (with grace-notes of “Aztec Terminalissimo”) in the applied terracotta ornaments. There’s quite an inventory of similar period office towers in the old downtown of America’s seventh largest city, a great many of them already rehabbed and sparkling again. Very impressive! The city must have been roaring like all git-out in the 1920s. (Oil money, would be my guess.)

Of course, this prompts you to wonder: what on earth was going on in their brains in the 1960s that would prompt such an horrific defacement of this building? It really boggles the mind. Perhaps it was a simply shame. . . for being less than up-to-date in the new GoGo decade. All those lovely figured ornaments embarrassed them, like looking at grandma’s old flapper outfit from the 1929 Roughneck’s Ball, where she drank too much gin, danced the Black Bottom on an ice sculpture of the Alamo, and passed out face down in a bowl of chili. Or perhaps the darn thing had just grown dingy from forty years of auto emissions and, rather than clean it, they opted for a cheap “skin job,” as the architects say, on some sales-pitch that the rain would keep it clean.

But, good Gawd. . . that hideous matrix of blue and red enamel panels? If architecture is a kind of language, the new dress-up said, “Look, I’m a moron now!”

Finally, the new owners who bought it out of foreclosure did the honorable thing and saved it, returned it to its former glory. Looks like it will be re-purposed as a hotel. Kudos to ya!

And salutes to Breck Breckenridge for the nomination!

Thar she blows: Elon Musk’s new / retro Tesla Diner on the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Orange Street in Hollywood, CA. Designed to appeal to the deepest techno-narcissistic yearnings of the tech genius class of Americans. . . a very small demographic. It’s all sleek chrome and glass, with overtones of UFO. Cutting Edge! Transhuman chic! America is probably as sick of the tech fantasia trend as it is with Woke ideology. We’re beginning to grok that the future isn’t what it was cracked up to be. I predict the Tesla Diner will soon become the target of flash mobs seeking Rolex watches, Hermès Birkin handbags, and the keys to hot cars parked in its modest lot.

Note (in shot below, which is likely a rendering, not a real photo) that the structure actually addresses the street-corner properly. It’s brought up to the sidewalk edge as a truly urban building with ground-floor retail should be. Parking is in mid-block. Points for that. The neighborhood is attempting to densify with multistory apartment buildings. But LA, as we know, is struggling with suicidal tendencies, what with massive homeless squalor, the “undocumented” La Raza invasion, and Marxist municipal politics. I’m not so sure the densification project will continue.

Also note (photo following the one below) just how weak and squalid the urban condition is right across Santa Monica Blvd from the diner.

You might as well be in Jolliet, Illinois.

This slumping row-house in London’s Charterhouse Square is not a “building” per se, but rather an objet-d’art from the Stunt-and-Clutter school of contemporary art called “A Week at the Knees” by one Alex Chinneck. I confess, I don’t even get the verbal gag. Seems like a non-sequitur to me. But so is most of the production from Stunt-and-Clutter Ltd.

The aim is to astound the public with startling originality. Since there are no longer that many new things under the sun, this calls for ever more extreme ventures into the absurd and hallucinatory. Between the general overload of Internet-generated info civilized folks are subjected to these days, and the new over-lay of paranormal mischief inherent to artificial intelligence, we are becoming a society increasingly untethered from reality.

So, then it must be celebrated, right? As we celebrate every other psychical abnormality foisted on us by the grant recipients of what passes for the culture industry.

One might say what you get here is a perfect domicile for the drug-addled homeless. Living in the tunnel created by this undulation, they could find exactly the kind of home that suits them, without sacrificing their identity as "homeless.” Genius!!

Salutes to J. David Green for the nomination!

This Month we put aside the eyesore motif to remember Leon Krier (1946-2025), the great architect and urbanist who was “godfather” to the movement for restoring artistry, beauty, and decorum in an everyday world much debased by the idiocies of various Modern-isms, and by the fiasco of suburban sprawl.

Leo passed away this week at 79. I knew him somewhat, having spent time with him at conferences and in cafes, and corresponding with him over the years. He was a gallant, humorous, and supremely talented fellow who brought much light into an increasingly darkened world.

He is perhaps best-known for designing the project known as Poundbury in Britain, sponsored by Prince Charles (now King Charles III). Poundbury was intended to demonstrate that traditional urban design will produce places worthy of our affection — as opposed to the spiritually annihilating environments of strip-malls, “housing developments,” and skyscraper city centers that became the norm after 1950, the world of eyesores this website features.

Though he worked for King Charles on the Poundbury project, Leo dissociated himself from the “Globalist” / Woke agenda years ago, which he regarded as the political expression of the despotic Modern-isms cultivated in the graduate schools and promoted by the money-chasing architectural firms.

The reform movement Leo heralded became the New Urbanism movement in America, a very potent force, since the 1990s, for rectifying the mutilated human habitat all over our country. Alas, the past decade, the New Urbanists succumbed to Woke idiocy and, even more catastrophically, their model of the “walkable community” has become conflated with the Globalist “Fifteen-minute City,” based on surveillance and control of the population. I hope they can work that out.

Leo was also beloved for the books he wrote and the wonderfully witty diagrams he drew to graphically communicate ideas about architecture and urban design that are hard to put over with mere words. For instance:

Get the picture(s)? I also highly recommend Leon Krier’s excellent book The Architecture of Community, for a compressive study of his work. Though born in Luxembourg, he wrote in English more eloquently (and wittily) than most Anglos.

I leave you with a shot of another marvelous project designed by Leo, the Cayala district outside Guatemala City, a project completed more recently than Poundbury. As always with Leo, the picture says much more than mere words about the man and his art.

Behold: The new home for the Milwaukee Public Museum — to be renamed the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin — in downtown Milwaukee. Kind of looks like four laundry hampers, though the official PR says “the rock formations at Mill Bluff State Park in central Wisconsin served as design inspiration.” Credit the architectural firms of Ennead Architects (New York), with Kahler Slater (Milwaukee).

Like many state museums, this one is a hodgepodge of history, nature (what used to be called natural history), ethnography (i.e., Indians), DEI nonsense (hey, it’s Wisconsin), and a miscellany of artifacts and freakish stuff that was the stock-in-trade of old-time Midwestern raree shows: a stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker (extinct). . . the William J. Uihlein Postage Stamp Collection. . . a deck of “Apache playing cards”. . . the skeleton of a mammoth found by farmer John Hebior in Kenosha County. . . costumes from Deakin's Lilliputian Comic Opera (a theater company of midgets circa 1880s). . . The DeFlores Collection of Disney Memorabilia, 1965-1987. . . and a clay seal imprinted with a hieroglyph signifying the name Tutankhamen (a.k.a. King Tut). Heck, I’d pay ten bucks to see all that!

Below is an artist’s rendering of the lovely public plaza attached to the laundry hampers — as usual in American landscape design, an ambiguous zone with no formal elements, arbitrary tree plantings, and apparently no seating (homeless magnets). It’s how we roll!

Behold the lovely new Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Building at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. Complements the nearby parking deck! It’s a cancer research center, designed by HDR Architects, Omaha. Certainly has that American heartland tumor spirit! The promotional literature says, “the COVID-19 pandemic significantly influenced the design.” The building is intended to symbolize “hope and progress,” it says. Strange to relate, the percentage increase in cancer cases in the USA from 2021 to 2024 (the latest fully projected year) is approximately 12.6 percent. Could that have anything to do with the Covid-19 vaccines? Perhaps researchers in the Kellen Building can figure that out. By the way, in July 2021, Mayo Clinic announced that all staff, regardless of work location, were required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. They were dead certain it was the right thing to do.

Behold the decorative cornice of this humdinger from Dennison, Texas, corner of Rusk and W. Chestnut.. Known locally as the “Penis Building,” the motif supposedly emerged from a dispute between the developer and the city’s building code department, which repeatedly refused him a permit because his proposed building “lacked suitable ornamentation.” Moral of the story: Bureaucrats, be careful of what you wish for.

History note from Jim Owen, realtor, who nominated this charmer:

Denison in the late 1800’s was a thriving railroad town until the town pissed off the railroad, who wanted to expand their presence, thus, they moved to Houston. During that time, prostitution was the main business in the very blocks where the Penis Building was located, perhaps that’s why the builder chose that ornament. In fact the town was in dire financial straits and saved the coffers by charging the prostitutes a license fee.

The building appears to have been severely modified since its heyday. Weep for history! The same address today:

Behold (above) the federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama by HBRA Architects. And, no, it was not conceived when Andy Jackson was fighting the Battle of Emuckfaw against the “Red Stick” Creek Indians in 1814. Rather, it went up in 2012, a rare example of neoclassical design executed in our time.

For the most part, though, the decades-long trend in American civic architecture has been for sui generis one-off, tortured-genius, para-metaphysical, high-tech, in-your-grille stunt buildings commissioned to shock and confound the middle class (Épater le bourgeois, as the French dubbed this maneuver).

These generally horrified the public (as intended), as well as perplexing and confusing them, making their interaction with the building a form of punishment. Often it was difficult to even discern where the entrance of the building was, or where to go once you managed to get inside. For instance, the recent San Francisco Federal building by Tom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, below, designed in the style of a dashboard from an alien spacecraft:

At its worst, you got the conjunction of malign form and evil function, as concretized in Washington’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, home office (mother ship) of the FBI, below:

Kind of looks like a giant stroopwafel jammed under a coffee table. You can be sure that little good came out of it, especially the past four years, and probably the whole six decades of its miserable existence. FBI-Director nominee Kash Patel went so far as to propose it be turned into “a Museum of the Deep State.” Well, yes. Perfect!

Below, see another new-ish civic structure dressed in neo-Georgian formality: the Alpharetta, GA, City Hall by David M. Schwartz architects — granted, not a federal building, but proof that trad proportions and details can be done well, where there’s a will to get’er done. Nice, huh. Dignified. Serene, confident, legible. . . reflecting what is to be desired in a polity, sanity and grace.

Why trad design, you might ask? Initially, with our nation’s founding, there was a wish to express our national ethos in architecture that denoted the democratic spirit of Ancient Greece melded with the order of the early Roman republic. And so, you got this bold neoclassicism for over a hundred years, climaxing in the US Supreme Court’s headquarters, completed in 1935, below:

There are hidden charms in this neoclassicism. You may notice that the building is organized with a base, a middle and a top (or capitol). Indeed, not just the whole, but its parts ( e.g., the columns) express this tripartite organization. This expresses the organization of the human body, with feet and legs, a trunk, and a head. Thus, it reflects our essential humanness back at us and confers dignity in the works of man and mankind itself.

Sure there are other ways of making buildings, but are they expressing what we want to say about ourselves? Might we want to suggest that there is a sacred order to the human project, and be reminded of it forcefully in our monumental buildings?

This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com

Eyesore of the Month Since 1998

For the first time ever, you can now binge-read and comment on the complete “Eyesore of the Month” archive going all the way back to this feature’s debut in March 1998. That’s more than 300 architectural blunders, abortions and abominations to make you chortle, snort and guffaw. Click here to read them all.

Could this possibly be real? It was on a Trulia real estate site in a New England town not to be named. I cannot be more specific, to avoid legal hassles. It’s 10,000 square feet on 6 acres, 9 BRs, 9 baths. Priced at $3,670,600. (What could that final $600 possibly signify?) Some builder gave steroids, Mescaline, and ketamine to the notion of a neo-Georgian house, and this is what you get in that state of “dissociative anesthesia.” (Or perhaps more like aphasia.) Note the three fountains arbitrarily deployed so as to defeat their purpose as focal points. Note the unnecessary brick planting boxes for the cedar shrubs. Note the chimney runs interrupted by windows. Note the blank wall first floor beneath that. Note the triplex fake Georgian windows above the front entrance (scary!). Note the fanlights at left with no windows in them. We have absolutely lost it.

Thanks to Wayne Maglione for the nomination.

Eyesore of the Month Since 1998

For the first time ever, you can now binge-read and comment on the complete “Eyesore of the Month” archive going all the way back to this feature’s debut in March 1998. That’s more than 300 architectural blunders, abortions and abominations to make you chortle, snort and guffaw. Click here to read them all.

We’re all for adaptive re-use of old buildings, but just maybe consider a little artistry in the execution of the project. This humdinger used to be St. Somebody’s church in Lawrence, Massachusetts, until a developer got ahold of it and dumped a packing crate over its head to build some commodity “housing.” It’s horrible enough brand-new, but imagine how it will age out. Nice treatment of the gothic windows on the original façade. Just brick-em up — with plywood option. Why bother saving it, really? The new windows on the packing-crate addition are remarkable, too, for their complete absence of aesthetic. They are, in fact, just holes in the wall covered in glass. If the units within are condos, as opposed to rentals, then I tremble for the future of the homeowner’s association that comes with the whole package. Flat roof failure warning ahead. Just sayin’. . . .

Thanks to Tom Thomas for the nomination and to Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) for posting the darn thing on “X”.

Eyesore of the Month Since 1998

For the first time ever, you can now binge-read and comment on the complete “Eyesore of the Month” archive going all the way back to this feature’s debut in March 1998. That’s more than 300 architectural blunders, abortions and abominations to make you chortle, snort and guffaw. Click here to read them all.

November 2024

Behold, the new Rose des Vents student apartments at the Technopôle Angus, Montreal, Canada! Zut alors ! ! ! Our neighbor to the north, laboring harshly under the regime of Justin Trudeau, has developed an extreme penchant for self-punishment. Hence, its student housing draws inspiration from the great 1954 movie by director Don Siegel, Riot in Cell Block 11.  Yes, Looks exactly like the municipal lockup in a small-to-medium city. The two top floors just scream “Exercise Yard” with all that chain-link fencing. The ground floor has even less character than the building above, signifying nothing. Since that’s where the building meets the street, it will serve as a people-repellant. (People like to know what they’re walking into.) Designed by the Montreal architecture firm ADHOC. Now, imagine it in January of a Montreal winter: windswept, with giant piles of filthy snow all around.

Shout-out to Ray Sawhill for the nomination.

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Our heads are stuffed with assumptions about “the future,” mainly that it will be more futuristic — meaning, at least, that things must look different than they look now. In the world of architecture, that means buildings must be wildly different, even shockingly different. We must believe in a future that contains no recognizable human touchstones. It will be obvious, when the future actually arrives, that this was essentially a psychopathic Jacobin-type movement to upend the culture of Western Civ. And for what end? For what benefit? For the aggrandizement of the architects playing a dumb game of one-upping each other in how violently they can disturb the cultural consensus.  Any game played at the gigantic scale can turn into a racket, and that is what this Modernist Futurism (let’s call it) has become.

As I see the future, I would not assume that commercial aviation persists as a feature of daily life very far into the future. In fact, it is already disintegrating visibly at the margins — in the ability of airplane manufacturers to produce planes that work dependably; of airlines being able to maintain their planes reliably; of passengers being able to afford the air-fares; of the level of service to remain acceptable (meaning, delays, cancellations, poor cabin comfort, safety, available competent pilots); in the availability of affordable jet fuel derived from oil. There’s already a lot to be concerned about.

The building pictured above is certainly striking, but mostly because it fails to signify any comprehensible idea of what the building is for. It doesn’t really help humans to be confronted with incomprehensible objects. At best, this air-control tower looks like a hybrid composed of a computer server and a very large robot. And the scale is necessarily domineering. I believe that not only do we not want or need to be dominated by computerized A-I, and any sort of robots, BUT, I’m serenely convinced that the future will not be able to deliver either the robots or the A-I very far ahead because our electric grid is too flimsy to permit it. I’m also persuaded that if A-I and robotics become too dangerously intrusive to daily life, citizens will band together to destroy the distributed hardware of the electric grid. They will shoot out the transformers and the relays rather than submit to robotic fuckery. Chew on that this month.

Behold, the ghost of a formerly charming streetscape superimposed over a brutal Toronto skyscraper! Does it remind you of Canada’s current government: the ghost of political dignity over the brutal tyranny of Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland — ? As a matter of pure urban design, this pentimento of antique buildings informs us how much human scale matters. The human eye really only takes in how a building meets the street and  the few floor above. Within that spatial frame, the parts of the building can communicate profound ideas about civilized life, such as the need for decorum and aspiration (towers and finials). The windows are treated not as holes-in-a-wall, but relationships between the inside and the outside of a building, embellished with suitable grace-notes  (decorated lintels, arches with keystones). The windows are vertical, expressing the dignity of the human figure (buildings are anthropomorphic). The actual skyscraper behind this display achieves none of this.Rather, it presents as a titanic act of brutality — which is exactly in-synch with Canada’s current national spirit.

Shout-out to Demetrius Kappos for the nomination.  (Yes, we were rather late this mont. Apologies….)