The Most Beautiful Slideshow of the Ugliest Buildings in the World

The “property picture galleries” section of The Telegraph is a fantastic place to spend time day-dreaming about the abode of your dreams — whether it be a hip L.A. bungalow or one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s retrofuture masterpieces — as well as check out some of the best architecture around the world. It’s a sanctuary for the type of picture-heavy posts that the Internet sucks back with a relish only matched by my appreciation of happy hour gin and tonics. It’s evidence that, even if it might be a bit more highbrow than a lot of what’s on StumbleUpon, folks staring at their computers on a brain-fried afternoon like nothing more than to click through some pretty, albeit bland photo spreads.

But every now and then, photo sections really go for the jugular, and “Are these the ugliest buildings in the world?” is a case in point. Sure, I would have loved the simple hilarity of turning that headline into an affirmative, but rendered as a question, the suggestion both snarky and British in its reservedness. Sure, there are plenty of unattractive buildings out there. But it’s rare that you come across a photo post — a format that tends to be a bit of an editorial throwaway — that stamps “UGLY” on a building that’s shaped like a fucking picnic basket.

In a rare bit of populist architecture porn, playing to our schahedenfreud impulses in a section that’s otherwise an envy magnet, the un-bylined post inverts the starchitecture trend that’s captured the Internet’s attention for at least a decade. And just as the architecture world is atwitter over New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger leaving the magazine, maybe in part because editor David Remnick was more interested in being first than being good.

Amid all of the debate about content creators, aggregators, and curators, there’s an essential truth of the Internet that I think gets looked down upon: Because the web is a platform on which anyone can publish, people are able to publish any snippet of their lives, including “lazy” things like a cellphone video of a cat. That content is so successful because people want to share fun and funny and fascinating things with other people, and want to find out about funny little moments in others’ lives. There’s a vast portion of the Internet that succeeds solely because it’s modeled off of America’s Funniest Home Videos and a rambling, musing newspaper columnist like Owen Wilson in Marley and Me. As much as media types try to disagree on Twitter, the Internet isn’t simply another platform for publishing scathing commentary and ‘hard-hitting’ news pieces.

At the same time, the balance can swing too far in the wrong direction. National Geographic’s stable of incredible photographers was made for the web, and Buzzfeed has made a name for itself by continually honing the rough equations that make posts go viral. But for each great post from sites like those, there are a thousand other SEO-honed roundups of Google Image results that offer nothing more than brainless clicking fodder for bored clowns.

The Telegraph piece is guilty in that sense: a superlative like “ugliest” matched with “in the world” is clearly search bait, and forcing users to click through image one by one is a cheap way to boost pageviews. With its facepalm-worthy photos from exotic sites — pieced together largely from the catalog of stock photography mega-ultra-turbo-giant Alamy — and no commentary whatsoever, it’s a shining example of shareable photo porn: fun to gawk at, utterly useless as criticism. The headline is a model too, not for any stylistic reasons but because it begs for the opinions and protestations of idle readers, also known to web gurus as precious “engagement.”

I guess all that, combined with how faceless it is — aside from the lack of byline, there’s no context to the post whatsoever — was what inspired me to ponder the post in the first place. Truly, I get a kick out of it, mostly because I enjoy the idea of a nameless Telegraph intern building an architecture hate list that’s received over 2,000 likes. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. Sure, it falls into the fast food section of my Internet diet. But until I start gorging myself on Photoshop fail roundups — followed by shameful binge-eating on Longreads — I’m going to keep pressing that right arrow.