Would adding addresses or map locations ruin this ?

@2 - I think the word you are looking for is "Brutalist".

Only in lollipop colors... o_O

BRIGHTER COLORS!! MORE SHAPES! TRIANGLES! WOLF HEADS! STRAP ONS!! LEATHER!! CHAINS! MATTE BLACK ON GOLD!

The mysterious open space atop its two-toned yellow building, niiiiice. And windows like that for a basketball court? I could be inspired to sink a "J" now and then. Cool new column!

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/highschool…

I really like the first "deplorable" one!

Also, i feel like the third deplorable one shouldn't count. It's under construction!

@2, @3, there is nothing remotely Brutalist about any of these buildings. Kitschy, perhaps, but not Brutalist.

There is also nothing Brutalist about buildings with square sides. Plenty of Brutalist buildings are curved or round. The Space House in London, or indeed the Westin right here in Seattle, for instances.

Buildings tend to be square because the streets they are on are straight, and because square rooms are best for normal uses, furniture, etc. Gratuitously curved buildings waste space and annoy the people who have to live with them. Square buildings also line up on the street better, abutting each other, the way buildings are supposed to do.

Seattle is largely a grid city, which means square buildings. There's nothing objectionable about square buildings per se; the Empire State is square. A curved corner is cool, but hardly necessary.

These buildings are all hideous but their success or failure has nothing whatever to do with "beauty" and everything to do with how they interact with the street and the city around them. Beautiful or ugly, in a few years when their physical features recede from consciousness and they disappear into the wall of the street, nobody will know or care if they are "attractive" or not. It's an irrelevant characteristic. It's like wanting to marry someone because they have good tensile strength or something.

all these buildings look exactly the same

That last one is probably my least favorite building in the city.

I like the first deplorable and the last adorable. The rest can fall through a sinkhole to the center of the Earth and burn in hell.

@10
good comment. I may add that the companion photos be shown holding hands walking along the beach at sunset.

A friend of mine labeled the building at Boylston and E Republican, The Cosby Sweater.

@7 But God these have a chillingly sterile quality about them. A little brick, and maybe wood might help. God knows if I were paying $500 to $600/squ foot for a condo I would want some functional warmth

I disagree with the second from last, those balconies are offensive.

@9: you're welcome

Seattle, what you're looking at is your very own zoning code. My memory fails me at the moment, but I recall specific municipal code prescriptions that require facade modulation (above street level) to maintain "visual interest" so that:

1) everything looks like this: http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogim…

2) in order to avoid everything looking like this: https://goo.gl/maps/ZKNfV

3) which has the unfortunate side effect of outlawing beauties like this:
https://goo.gl/maps/c49U7

Notice how the delayed 1986(?) reaction to the boom year 1960s developments resulted in 1995-present day hideousness. I suppose only the terrifyingly uniform white walls of the prison in George Lucas' original THX-1138 (fuck the Director's Cut) can approach the hideous homogeneity, depravity, and hopelessness of what zoning code prescriptions will result from Seattle City Council's eventual reaction to today's uniform mediocrity.

I tell you now (some 30 years too late?) that Seattle is going to be a very, very ugly city in 20-50 years time when all of the NC-45 to NC-85 zoning is built out. (Never mind the demographics also aligning with San Francisco.) Seattle's only architectural hope is in preserving its placemaking Seattle boxes, taking its more-Houston-than-Houston downtown skyscrapers ever taller, or in civic one-offs such as the Downtown Library or the Space Needle. Or a very good train line to Portland or Vancouver BC. Godspeed.

I think Deplorable / Tolerable would be a better fit for these architectural mediocrities.

thank you #19 ... the 3 materials rule is wretched and no substitute for actual design.
All of these further cement my view that Seattle is a pretty horrible town for architecture.

@20: the era is horrible.

We have exactly one of these in Spokane. It was built by Gonzaga University to house their elite students.
In it's last stages of construction it was burned to the ground by someone The Jesuits didn't get it and built it again.
http://binged.it/16t9WsF

There should be a ban on buildings that have plasticky-looking panels in yellow, blue, or russet color. And the angularity or squareness of buildings isn't the problem; it's the relentlessly flat facades and the cheap flat roofs.

As architect for one of these fine mixed-use buildings, I welcome the dialogue, the criticism, appreciation, trolling, thoughtfulness -- hell, even just noticing.

@2, oh yes, curves, that's a classic. Look to the turrets and tourettes that that you see around town. If an architect can't get a straight line right, what make you think that a curve is going to go down better?
@4, now that's a spot-on comment. Design Review often leads us towards the strap-on approach, see turrets, above.
@5, that is a fantastic building. Nice balance between providing texture to a facade and the "Cosby" or "measles" approach seen of late. BTW, @14, the Cosby reference is perfect.
@7, your last paragraph is exactly the vantage point for designing block after block of housing. Each should be a beautiful flower of proportion and scale, but we should be creating a field and not a series of unique wonders. Soon, it should be the culture that tenants and businesses and a growing landscape that make it a neighborhood, not some fantastical architectural wonder that grows tiresome with the years.
@8, no they do not. perhaps they should.
@18, the zoning code is a mess, and instead of making if more unified, we seem to be chopping it into smaller and smaller, less understandable bits. Sadly, design is dictated by code limits and construction budgets, along with a near-sighted DR process.

All in all, fantastically bad architecture is in every city, along with a few beauties. I love trying to do great things when given the chance, and love hearing all the actual feedback. It would be great if some Seattle publication actually had architectural critique -- because it isn't happening through the design review process.

Please, NOT while I'm eating!

The first building is right outside my bedroom window. In the neighborhood we refer to it as the Lego building. It houses people who are mentally challenged, so it's providing a valid social service to our community. But as I overheard, 'you'd have to be nuts to live there'.

@4, that's how I make love too

All those buildings look like AutoCAD 3D renders.

Yes, a topic near and dear. The buildings built in this city over the last 20 years make Seattle look like MechaGodzilla came to town and instead of busting the place up just walked around taking big MechaDumps all over.

That first building is so ugly that it actually stopped me in my tracks on a recent run to laugh/gasp in horror. It hurts the eyes.

Make this an app please! Swipe left for deplorable. I would so buy that.

Wins today's butt ugly architecture contest. For more, check out www.cheapshitcondos.com

There is a ton more of this crap in SLU and on Capitol Hill thanks to an architectural community that doesn't mind saying "Fuck You Seattle."

I saw no adorable or deplorable. I saw some new generic looking boxes too bland to be hated or loved.

#8 nailed it. All of these buildings, "adorable" or "deplorable", are all just little boxes, all made of ticky tacky. They all look just the same. There's a (brick or russet) red one, and a (Tyvek) green one...

I like a balcony, as long as it's a real balcony - meaning you can fit at least a few chairs out there. These fake balconies make me want to set myself on fire.

As far as ugly goes, I think Vancouver takes the cake. It picked the wrong decade to explode its population.

But the saving grace for both Seattle and Vancouver have is scenery. So what if we've got ugly apartment buildings?

All of these buildings are cold and boxy. very little creativity went into their exterior architecture. fitting in a sad way because to many people Seattle is a pretty 'cold' city.

Why the fuck don't any of these new buildings look jazzy, even slightly? Why hold back? Sheesh

But all of those old apartment buildings that everyone loves were the cookie cutters of their day. Just a little bit fancier, as befitted the times.

Just today I was down in Tacoma, looking at the sad remains of the Winthrop Hotel. It's a beautiful old building, and should be restored, but the stonework on it is exactly the same stuff you see on hundreds of old buildings. Two winged cat-like things flanking an urn of some sort.

I love the idea of this column. I like architecture & buildings (purely from a hobbyist/sub-hobbyist perspective - I've never even taken courses on architecture, let alone practiced it), and love the idea of looking around our city and finding interesting buildings to talk about.

That said, I would love for the author to include a couple of sentences about each choice and specifically why it goes into the Adorable/Deplorable category. Scrolling through them all they all kinda looked the same - am I missing something? Do they stand apart more if you see more photos (or look around in person)? (It also seems a bit premature to criticize the one that's still under construction).

Still - awesome idea, and I look forwards to more of these columns!

When this building was going up, I thought, "Hey, that one's not too bad." And then they stuck those horrible gymnasium floor tiles to the outside. Now it looks like a circa 1995 trendy youth hostel in the former East Germany.