I'm shocked that my college didn't make the list.

We fugly: [link]

I actually thought they did a fair job of distinguishing modern-that-failed from just-plain-looks-like-a-bunker.

Ehn, I really disliked the sneering at UCSD and the other CA colleges, all of which certainly have their share of now-dated mid-century-to-70s modern stuff but also a lot of really striking work. I really kind of liked the building in the picture the author chose to demonstrate UCSD's obscene ugliness.

Dressing and decorating and painting our apartment and trying to make Hec's knickknack and art collection and mine make sense together over the last couple of years have all made me spend much too much time in "thinking way too much about this" mode, and about the line between "It's absolutely not my style, but I recognize its value" and "It's a piece of ugly crap and I hate it." I can't even point to where that line lies, but I did get a vague sense from reading the 20-best and 20-worst lists together that the listmaker is somewhere on the far side of it.

No way Drexel is the ugliest college. We used to call them Orange Brick U, but the orange brick buildings aren't ugly, just...bright. And I don't know what Bama is doing on the most beautiful list. It's just kind of generically collegiate, IMHO.

I'm kinda shocked Northeastern got the nod over B.U., but maybe we need an actual campus to be considered. Some of the acadmic buildings are nice, but Warren Towers looks like a prison block.

The campuses I know best, Penn and UW, are a mixture of the gorgeous and unfortunate, which, in a way, gives them a nice, lived-in look. They've grown over time and so have buildings reflecting a variety of architectural trends, budget crunches and splurges, and the like.

And I do tend to prefer old-school architecture to the modern kind--sometimes I feel like my aesthetic century is the 18th, and none of the fashions have been quite as beautiful after 1815 or so, be they music, architecture, clothing, or whatever. But I definitely differentiate between "not my style, but attractive for what it is" and "OMG WTF were they thinking?!"

Modern architecture is often much nicer on the inside than the outside, imho.

What looks like a barely clever box with some sort of jaunty roof angle ends up being this airy bathed in light space with amazing views and flow.

I know there's a lot of Pratchett fans here, and thus I'm assuming that they would want to hear some bad news that's just come out -- he's been diagnosed with the beginning stages of a form of Alzheimers.

[link]

We've been mourning that news in Literary, Theo.

a mixture of the gorgeous and unfortunate

I remember Tulane as the same. Big 19th century neo-Gothic at one end of the main quad, modern box on stilts (so the sidewalk could run under it) at the other, with social sciences in the middle in a wood frame building that would be only moderately out of place in the residential area of a small town.

a mixture of the gorgeous and unfortunate

This is actually my favorite school of campus architecture -- I've never been a fan of Everything Matches schools. They look to me like housing developments. Or bridesmaids. But when you've got a campus that developed over time and across a range of styles, you're gonna have some stinkers...