Featured Eyesore of the Month

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Behold Dubai’s Museum of the Future, the very first monumental building to be designed entirely by algorithm!

The official hype sez:

We will be a showplace for a new era – a center of creativity and hope where you can see, touch and shape our shared future.

And a megaphone for empty platitudes, too, like the oval hole in the center of the thing. Ironically the city of Dubai is exactly what you’d come up with if you wanted to design a building with no future — an overblown re-make of the worst elements of Los Angeles in a country with too much unearned money and no idea what to do with it. I’ve been there, too. I was brought in by McKinsey & Co. for a completely absurd urban planning session about five years ago. Most of the other “experts” on hand were MIT Media Lab dudes and computer animators from Disney (and one schmuck from the Harvard architecture school, real estate division). The Dubai officials thought that urban design was about projecting movies on buildings. I never sat through such a gale of idiocy, even at Midwestern land-grant diploma mill symposia. (Took me six months to get paid for the gig.)

Don’t worry.  By 2050, tawny eagles will be roosting in the skeletal ruins of  Dubai’s massive real estate folly. A genuine museum of the future would be a pre-owned camel sales office in a tent.

Thanks to Drew Keeling for the nomination.

By the way, notice how much the Museum of the Future resembles the abandoned space ship from the original Alien movie:

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold Dubai’s Museum of the Future, the very first monumental building to be designed entirely by algorithm! The official hype sez: We will be a showplace for a new era – a center of creativity and hope where you can see, touch and shape our shared future. And more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum of Art at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. Wait…. Is that the museum or the dumpster behind the Museum? Oh, okay, it’s the Museum. Designed by the late Zaha Hadid. Her firm styles the job thusly: This dialogue of interconnecting more »

  Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the MSG “Sphere” coming to Las Vegas. No, it’s not named after the indispensable ingredient in General Tsao’s Chicken, but after the Madison Square Garden Corp, which, like everything else in this psychotic culture, has morphed into a supergigantic global enterprise — they’re putting up an more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the renovated Edmonton, Alberta, downtown main library… or is an alien invasion under way? It’s hard to imagine a more aggressively menacing building than this intergalactic war-wagon. Message: Surrender, you miserable earthlings! Your way-of-life is over. So it goes with the unending quest for cutting edge novelty in more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold, the stupid fucking idea du jour! The Penn15 Tower proposed for mid-Manhattan — as if the city needs another megastructure that will be transformed from an asset to a liability overnight in the long emergency ahead. Penn15 will be nearly the same height as the Empire State more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold, the Vancouver House condominiums by the Bjarke Ingels Group (“BIG,” as they style themselves — no grandiosity there). Does the building appear to want to topple over and crush you? Isn’t that cute? Beware of what you wish for, especially with the Cascadia Fault lurking in the more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page The real estate website Zillow sez: “this contemporary home has a European flare with a Manhattan feel. Perfect for entertaining….” Actually, I’d say it has a Soviet flare with a recycling bin feel, perfect for opening a large vein in a warm tub. It’s in a Hudson Valley more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the new world headquarters for the Danish clothing firm Bestseller in the tiny town of Brande (pop. 7,000): set to be the tallest building in Europe. What a breathtakingly stupid idea! I suppose they think it will minimize the human footprint on the terrain. Wrong. (Typical “gadget more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold, the new $100,000-per-night hotel suite at The Palms resort in Las Vegas, featuring artworks by the international art-and-design maestro Damien Hirst, plus design motifs by same to liven up the despondency-inducing gray color scheme and the nausea-inducing view of a city that is composed of at least more »

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the Burj al Babas, a $200 million ensemble of wannabe French castles in the Turkish town of Mudurnu, about 150 miles east of Istanbul. The castle-ettes are all empty. (No cassoulet for you!) The project, by a money-laundering outfit, called the Sarot Group pulled the plug on more »