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Assorted links
1. The ugliest building in the world? I like it; Michael Blowhard doesn't.
2. Which is the ad and which is the painting?
3. Prediction markets in future tax rates, via Chris Masse
5. Newly translated interview with Borges
6. Via Jacqueline Passey, a new blog on strange products
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 8, 2008 at 11:57 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Finally, Cowen makes an assertion where I can say "I disagree with Tyler Cowen and I know I'm right".
Posted by: MattF at Feb 8, 2008 12:24:48 PM
It's ugly, but Boston City Hall has it beat.
Posted by: carpundit at Feb 8, 2008 12:27:22 PM
Wow, Boston City Hall is bad...it looks Soviet. I was expecting some quaint building from the colonial era. How can Boston, of all places, have such a non-historic city hall?
Posted by: Christopher Monnier at Feb 8, 2008 12:30:37 PM
Right-wingers have to disdain the Ryugyong Hotel to demonstrate their ideological purity.
Posted by: bartman at Feb 8, 2008 12:36:43 PM
Christopher Monnier,
Good question. I ask myself the same thing every day. That monstrosity is right outside my office window, occupying prime real estate about 1/4 mile from the water, right in the heart of city.
CP
Posted by: carpundit at Feb 8, 2008 1:04:04 PM
Everyone beat me to it...Boston City Hall.
Posted by: Kevin at Feb 8, 2008 1:14:12 PM
We already have prediction markets in future tax rates. Its called the municipal bond yield curve.
Posted by: Doug Colkitt at Feb 8, 2008 1:24:09 PM
Ugliest? It isn't even the fifth ugliest.
http://members.tripod.com/rossiya_david/id22.htm
Remember, nobody does hideous Stalinist architecture like Stalin. Accept no imitators
Posted by: Will McLean at Feb 8, 2008 1:26:12 PM
Will, I love those buildings (though my wife does not). Seriously.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Feb 8, 2008 1:34:01 PM
Ryugyong Hotel has a stubborn and out-of-this-world look to it that I like very much. It suites the city's personality to a T.
The strange product blog is a riot. The video is great.
Posted by: Yan Li at Feb 8, 2008 1:37:40 PM
I've actually seen that hotel up close. It absolutely dominates the Pyongyang skyline, but propaganda pictures avoid including it. It's amazing - you can still see the cranes up top even though work stopped two decades ago.
I would say that I like it, because though it appears like a hotel hovering over a failed, dystopian, autocratic state, North Korea is among the places where such an appearance is apt!
Posted by: cure at Feb 8, 2008 1:38:46 PM
Regarding ugly buildings, you can take the Scottish Parliament Challenge:
http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/architect/scotparl.html
The challenge is to find something nice to say about it.
Anything.
Posted by: Alex J. at Feb 8, 2008 1:43:47 PM
Good location. What do I win?
Posted by: James at Feb 8, 2008 2:04:07 PM
The Ryugong Hotel is the worst building in the world, not necessarily the ugliest. It is ugly, but that's only part of its awfulness; the Esquire article focuses more on its moral ugliness, rather than its physical ugliness.
For ugly buildings, it's hard to beat U.C. Berkeley's School of Architecture building, Wurster Hall. See this collection of photos, or just this photo.
"The building is sited within a couple of hundred yards of the Hayward Fault and is due for a major seismic retrofit."
Posted by: Anthony at Feb 8, 2008 2:08:06 PM
Doug, Yes but you need to look at the spread to taxable bonds, and that spread has basis risk with respect to future tax rates. Also what is the carry to go long or short taxes that way? If you have put on such trades, drop me a line.
Posted by: Jason Ruspini at Feb 8, 2008 2:09:13 PM
There are two contenders within 100 yards of each other in Oxford, Mississippi. You can tell a building is ugly when the official photo of it is from the angle with the most trees in the way. The fact it faces the Grove is a complete travesty. The Student Union ain't much better; it, too, faces the Grove.
Posted by: Chris Lawrence at Feb 8, 2008 2:53:59 PM
Eliot Hall, Washington University: also ugly, with a staircase attached to it that's been condemned, but not before bits of concrete started falling off of it.
I could spend all day posting hideous campus architecture. Gross Chemical Lab at Duke would be another serious contender.
Posted by: Chris Lawrence at Feb 8, 2008 2:58:42 PM
As for ugly buildings on the Berkeley campus, how about Evans Hall? It looks slightly better than it used to when it was unpainted concrete...
Posted by: Foobarista at Feb 8, 2008 4:27:18 PM
I think that the Ryugyong Hotel at least would be decent looking if it were finished. At the very least it is bold.
For something more like what you would expect from an unihabitable, abandoned, totalitarian edifice with serious engineering flaws, my money is on the House of Soviets in Kaliningrad. (Though, they have made some efforts to finish it and make some use of it in the past two years.)
Posted by: Rimfax at Feb 8, 2008 4:54:46 PM
La Sagrada Familia is pretty hideous. And it will probably never be finished.
Posted by: meter at Feb 8, 2008 5:21:05 PM
Alex: it looks like it could make a good setting for a video game.
I could like Boston City Hall, just not in Boston.
The most disappointing building to me is the Center for Innovative Technology just beyond Dulles airport. I thought it was a great building until they spoiled it by putting the logo on several sides, roughly a year ago. I can't find photos of it with the logo, probably because no one wants to take pictures of it anymore.
Maybe they just got tired of people driving over there to find out what it was. ::cough::
Posted by: Kat at Feb 8, 2008 6:45:28 PM
Anything in the University of California system built after 1950 should automatically go on the ugly list. Evans and Wurster are just two on a long list.
Posted by: anon at Feb 8, 2008 7:11:57 PM
Augmenting the list of awful campus building, walking through the Pollock Halls at Penn State always made me feel like I was in East Berlin in 1974.
Posted by: bartman at Feb 8, 2008 7:52:12 PM
Louisiana State Capitol building.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/22/27162846_5cdc755ce7.jpg
Posted by: Billy at Feb 8, 2008 10:49:43 PM
Generally speaking, the School of Architecture building on any major university campus is an automatic contender. If they don't have an Architecture department, then the Art building is likely to be hideous. For example, the Art department building on the Claremont University campus looks like they excavated Hitler's Bunker and reassembled it aboveground in the California sunshine.
I'm sure Tyler would like it.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 9, 2008 4:46:49 AM
