One man’s meat is another man’s poison. I rather like the Petronas Towers and the Sydney Opera House, especially as the rest of the city is so architecturally dull. For me most of Las Vegas is ugly, until the sun goes down and the lights come up. And if you’ve ever driven across the Arizona desert at night, there’s a moment (about half an hour after the Hoover Dam) when you round a corner and…WOW! But the Gran Lisboa Hotel in Macau is horribly kitsch and therefore fantastically ugly; lights on or off.

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What?! I was always impressed with the Sydney Opera House up-close. It makes some really interesting shapes against a nice, blue sky.

As far as ugly, you can’t go wrong with the many Brutalist-style buildings in London. Concrete rectangles, bleh.

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Anything erected post-1975 in Vietnam. The country has stunning countryside but its towns/cities, with the exceptions of Hoi An and parts of Hanoi & Hue, are hideous.

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PS just read the original article – amazed to see the Pompidou Centre on there, it’s one of the world’s most remarkable buildings and works really well surrounded by venerable old Parisian architecture.

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Not a testament to the legacy of the great man, the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi is quite a horrible, white-washed greyish concrete pentagon. Probably the ugliest structure I’ve seen on my travels.

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The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw; the NTT Docomo Tower in Tokyo, there are others, but these two immediately came to my mind.

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That horrible building you see from the water front in Montreal.. don’t remember the name..

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For sure the post-communist suburbs of Warsaw, Poland are an example of pure human alieniation and terrifying bad taste.

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Russian block apartments in Lithuania and Russia. Simply awful. They are everywhere and quite depressing.

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How can you say the Sydney opera house is ugly??? It is a magnificent icon.

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I was disappointed by Sydney Opera House. It’s very impressive from afar but when I got up close I thought I’d been whisked back to the 80s. Needs updating inside to match up to the skyline it creates. Sorry folks!

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I love the Sydney Opera House. I love it from a distance as it looks like white sails on a sparkling blue harbour. And I like the interesting shapes when you are up close. I love going to events there and walking up the steps – it feels so glamorous!

If you want to talk eyesores, I can’t stand the Barbican Centre in London. It feels so desolate and dated. I’d be scared to live there.

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Any building ever built in Los Angeles, CA.

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Vienna has such splendid Imperial architecture, and yet, just outside the Ringstrasse there is some of the most offensive architecture I’ve ever laid eyes on. I’m still reeling from that slumping beehive apartment block down near the Hutteldorferstrasse, it is possibly the ugliest thing I’ve seen that calls itself a building.

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The Church of the 26 Martyrs in Nagasaki, Japan gets my vote.

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@Darren, haven’t been in KL, but I like Sydney Opera House, especially in comparison with the rest of city. For me ugliest building so far (although didn’t see it alive either) is Ryugyong hotel in North Korea. May be it gonna look better when(?) they finish it.

@Brooke, I agree, most of apartment blocks build in 60s-80s in Eastern Europe look depressing especially because not so much sun out there and in winter everything is grey, grey, grey…

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