Ugliest Buildings in New York According to the Experts

Expert: David Haskell, Executive Director Forum For Urban Design: Here's the only building in New York I think is painfully ugly: the Sculpture for Living. The … high-end condo boom has produced other mistakes (see: Blue building), but those are not necessarily ugly--just misplaced, misguided and/or overwrought. The Astor place building, on the other hand, is bad from the ground up. Paul Goldberger's New Yorker review was too kind. [link]

Expert: Mosette Broderick, Department head of architecture and urban planning at NYU: I might suggest the banal white tile clad Upper East Side apartment buildings … built after the war. There are tons of them. Once known as "stewardess buildings" they are now condos. These buildings line First, Second and Third Avenues starting in the 70s. Then there are the sore thumbs that stand out badly like the Citibank building in Queens, or the building on 88th Street near First avenue which is triple the size of anything else around. Also, there are the office buildings of the 1950's and 60's on Sixth Avenue and especially Park Ave just above the Lever House. You have good at Lever and very bad across the street on 54th Street. [link]

Expert: Françoise Bollack, head architect of the firm Françoise Bollack Architects: I used to think the Mobil Building on 42nd street was ugly, but I've since … changed my mind. That gives you a feeling of the transitory nature of our feelings. I have trepidation of the new Museum of Art and Design building at Columbus Circle. It was originally designed by Edward Stone and seems to be being defaced. However, this hasn't been unveiled yet so I will reserve my judgment. There are some banal buildings like the Trump Buildings. And there are some mid century ugly buildings like the Pan Am building. [link]

Expert: John Beckmann, founder of architecture firm Axis Mundi: Anything with TRUMP on it is ugly. They're all equally bland, and it's too bad because he has the money … to actually build something important. By he's not interested in architecture, only money and power. [link]

Expert: John Lumea, author of architecture blog Horizonr: The one that keeps springing to mind is 750 Seventh Ave, near Times Square -- a 35-story office building … designed by Kevin Roche and completed in 1989. For a "developer building," it's probably a fair, albeit a little clunky and pedestrian, architectural response to its small island site. But the top, in particular, has that half-baked, cheap-ass quality of every front and rear-end that has rolled off a Detroit assembly line since, oh, 1972? And what's up with that sawed-off spire? It is possibly the most awkward, cumbersome, inelegant skyline presence of any tall building in the City. [link]

Expert: William Robinette, architecture graduate student at Columbia University: I've always thought the AT&T building down by Lafayette was unsightly. In trying … to come up with reasons why it's ugly, I'm actually thinking it's pretty cool. I guess it's ugly because it's boring...if you were looking for a really terrifying building it would be great. [link]

Expert: Chad Smith, architect and writer, author of Tropolism: Sometimes I think ugly works, brilliantly. For example, the Whitney Museum is ugly, in the sense that … it's raw concrete, windowless upper stories, and brutal anti-grav profile are very alien to most other buildings. But its brutality is what makes it wonderful--it's completely unlike the rest of the Upper East Side. The contrast, taken to its limit, is refreshing. And the way it meets the street, with the (technically innovative at the time) two-story glass windows that go from the ground level to the garden/cafe below, is simply brilliant, gracious, and, well, civic. It's not a building that it thumbing its nose to the city, but it's not trying to "match" either. So while I might describe it as ugly, it's also my favorite building in Manhattan. The best brutalist buildings do what the Whitney does: create a careful balance between material rawness and elegant connections. Needless to say, many brutalist buildings don't hit the mark: you need an architect as good as Breuer to pull it off. Runners up: The Lipstick Building by Phillip Johnson and the Museum of Television and Radio. [link]

Expert: Joey Arak, writer for Curbed: Easy. The Zebra. You come up from the tunnel, thrilled to be out of Jersey, and you're greeted by that monstrosity. Thank God … it's a rental building, because the thought of anyone shelling out hard-earned cash to own a chunk of that beast makes me want to put a plastic bag over my head. [link]

Expert: John Hill, author of architecture blog A Daily Dose of Architecture The ugliest (recent) building in New York is Hearst Tower by Foster + Partners. How to … obliterate history in five easy steps: Step 1: Hire Norman Foster. Step 2: Sit back and wait while Lord Foster channels R. Buckminster Fuller and designs a "diagrid" exterior wall. Step 3: Land the new 46-story tower on and in a 1928, six-story historical landmark, but be sure to keep the existing, two-dimensional exterior walls and clean 'em until they look like a molded plastic model. Step 4: Don't bother to give the building any sense of entry, and go ahead and make the grand lobby space inaccessible to the public while you're at it. Step 5: Market the sustainable aspects of the tower to gloss over its ugly and hulking presence on the skyline. [link]

Expert: John Massengale, architect, architecture author, founding member of Congress for the New Urbanism Five "anti-uglies":The Empire State Building, … Grand Central Terminal, Otto Kahn Mansion, Shively Sanitary Tenements, and Park Slope. The last, of course, is not a building but a neighborhood, but the beauty of New York, or any city, is in how the buildings go together. For the worst, I would pick not a building but the Cross Bronx Expressway, a supremely ugly, anti-urban structure. In some parts of the city, it's exactly like the Berlin Wall, but uglier. [link]

Expert: Jason Van Nest, intern architect: Here a skyscraper crafted at the scale of the city was likened, or reduced to a simple piece of furniture with a Chippendale … top. It caused a stir because the crowning detail was interpreted as a blithe gesture, an act of nonchalance that everyone in Midtown is forced to confront on their daily walk. Instead, one would hope that architecture should inspire loftier aspirations than these casual, reductive analogies. With the Freedom Tower, critiques run well ahead of construction because it's simultaneously viewed as a failure of Architecture to represent or address the spirit of the times; a failure of our city to address the needs of its people; and a portrait of corporate greed being the strongest voice shaping public space downtown. [link]