U-G-L-Y: That’s right, Washington, D.C., is home to the ugliest building in the entire United States! (Sigh.)
A new report by construction and building material supplier Buildworld found that D.C.’s J. Edgar Hoover Building—the 2.4 million-square-foot headquarters for the FBI—is the ugliest building in the U.S. and the second-ugliest in the world.
“Bland architecture on a massive scale makes life dull for locals and tourists alike. But a dramatically ugly building can spark a passionate ‘love to hate’ affair,” Buildworld wrote of the interest in such abysmal architecture. “A big, awful building represents a lot of the frustrations that everyday people (and other Twitter users) love to vent about: wealth or wasted public funds, big government or misdirected councils and a world that is tough to navigate or even wilfully hostile.”
Buildworld made its determinations by curating a worldwide list of buildings often referred to as ugly, then used an analysis tool to identify and examine negative tweets about these buildings and their design on Twitter and rank them by the percentage of verbal abuse they received.
“Over one-third of tweets about the J. Edgar Hoover Building are negative in sentiment. And yes, it’s not pretty — but there’s a certain Minecraft-y charm about the blocky brutalist monolith,” wrote Buildworld. “The FBI HQ was fashionable, practical and even a little utopian when it was designed in the 1960s (an open courtyard for agents to eat lunch, files safely archived deep in the core of the building). But today, its very bulk evokes the worst of 20th-century politics and the 21st-century surveillance state.”
Unfortunately, that isn’t the only eyesore that D.C. boasts. The report also found that the Watergate Complex—infamously known as the location of the Watergate scandal—is also largely hated by the masses, ranking as the fourth ugliest building in the U.S.
But hey, D.C. is also home to a number of beautiful monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial, which was named one of the most beautiful man-made structures in the world by Reader’s Digest. You win some, you lose some!