Dr. Metablog

The world's ugliest building, or at minimum a top competitor for the title, is located just a block or so down the street from our present abode. Too damn close, in fact, because it broadcasts its miasma of aesthetic gloom directly at me. It's a large ungainly brick cube — windowless, characterless, featureless, probably designed by an untalented deadwood kind of guy who drew his inspiration from a childhood of toying with Legos. "A doctor can bury his mistakes", said Frank Lloyd Wright many years ago, "but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." Vines is what this shameless structure needs — thick ropes of kudzu and lianas, whole Jurassic jungles of them — but no such luck.

It's a CenturyLink building nowadays, but for what purpose it was originally created is unknown to me. CenturyLink is an "internet provider." No doubt its insides are more beautiful than its outside. How strange! Magnificent images and lovely turns of phrase, unknown and invisible to its neighbors, portal in and portal out! 

I can't get a good picture of the entire building, but, please, take a good luck at this street-side ornament: 

It's a (gasp!) recreation or luncheon area for employees to enjoy their leisure. But notice the furniture: could there be anything more uninviting in all of North America than the cast concrete table and benches?  And against the wall, unconcealed, a decoration of some sort of gas-regulating apparatus. Perhaps to be used as a foot rest! The bars suggest that the architect must have recently visited either a zoo or a prison, perhaps both. An employee who actually made use of these facilities must necessarily imagine him/herself to be an inmate on public display. Keep those neighbors out! Keep the employees locked up! (Which must account for the fact, that although I've lived nearby for 13 years, I've never once seen a denizen with a book in hand or observed a drop of coffee sipped or spilled. And why?  Perhaps it's

the admonitory sign, which, along with the locked metal door, says it all. Who should be prosecuted? Trespassers or architect?

 

Vines! more vines!