LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Trump International Hotel sticks out like a sore thumb.
That’s the takeaway from an analysis of tweets used to compile a list of the world’s ugliest buildings. The shiny gold monolith ranked as the sixth-ugliest building in the U.S. and the 10th-ugliest in the world in a list released by Buildworld, a British home improvement company.
An analysis of tweets showed that 17.39% of comments on the building were negative. By comparison, the world’s ugliest building — the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh, Scotland — had 42.07% negative comments. The J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., was second at 37.84% negative comments.
The list also broke out the Top 10 ugliest buildings in the U.S.:
The details of which buildings were considered in the first place gets a little complicated. But it’s not the first time the Trump tower has been hated on. A 2018 list compiled by Architectural Digest put the tower at 28th worst on a list of 29 skyscrapers around the world. So it’s just possible the hate has grown over the past five years for reasons other than architecture:
Not everything beautiful needs to flash like gold. The Trump Tower in Las Vegas is a perfect example of that. Completed in 2008, the 620-foot-tall structure is an eyesore even in a city filled with over-the-top architecture.
Architectural Digest, 2018
In November 2016, a columnist on the design website dezeen panned the architecture — and Donald Trump, who had just won the presidential election: “Trumpitecture clings to easy symbols. Big means strong. Bigger means stronger. There is a tale of Trump shortening an adjacent building in a scale model of Manhattan so his building would stand taller in his view which, despite being patently false, was clearly better. The Las Vegas Trump Tower is literally gold in colour. A gold tower in Las Vegas. Ponder the subtleties.”
A former Las Vegas tour guide recalled a tourist’s description of the tower: It’s gold and shiny, but there’s not much inside.
If you haven’t noticed it, the building is just behind the Fashion Show mall on the Strip, just east of Interstate 15 between Spring Mountain Road and Desert Inn Road.
No other Las Vegas buildings made the Buildworld list, despite more hate heaped on “tacky architecture” by Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf in April last year. Term limits prevented Schaaf from seeking the mayor’s seat again last year.
Schaaf’s comments came in a back-and-forth as things got nasty about the possible Oakland As move to Las Vegas.
Listen, I respect that everyone … and I know Mayor (Carolyn G.) Goodman of Las Vegas has gotten into the fray as well. We’re always going to stick up for our cities. We love them. I do not, however, apologize for preferring the spectacular vista of our bay, our Bay Bridge, the San Francisco skyline, the sunset over the Pacific Ocean to the desert and some pretty tacky architecture.
Libby Schaaf, early April 2022 statement while she was Oakland mayor
Buildworld appeared less interested in politics and more in aesthetics.
“Bland architecture on a massive scale makes life dull for locals and tourists alike. But a dramatically ugly building can spark a passionate ‘love to hate’ affair. A big, awful building represents a lot of the frustrations that everyday people (and other Twitter users) love to vent about: wealth or wasted public funds, big government or misdirected councils and a world that is tough to navigate or even wilfully hostile,” according to a statement in the release.
The full list appears below (there’s a button to expand the list to show all 68 buildings):
The Trump International Hotel’s inclusion on the Architectural Digest list in 2018 is a big reason it was considered in the new list from Buildworld: “We built a seed list of buildings from authoritative rankings of the ugliest buildings worldwide and by country. These included all previous winners and nominees of the UK’s Carbuncle Cup and rankings of the world’s ugliest skyscrapers from Architectural Digest.”
From this list, tweets were analyzed and scored for negativity.
“We added the location of buildings that could not be easily determined by the name alone. For instance, we searched for ‘Trump Tower Las Vegas’ to avoid misleading results. We used the following keywords on the query: ‘design,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘view,’ ‘looks,’ ‘architectural,’ ‘style’, ‘ugly,’ ‘inspired,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘horrid,’ ‘concept,’ ‘aesthetic.’ We did not allow for duplicate tweets, and we only considered up to five tweets from the same account. Some tweets containing specific words were filtered out as well to ensure the majority of the data referred to the building itself.”