The vilest building you have ever been in

[Mr Larrington]

Continuing on the transportation theme, I will suggest the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Bus Terminal (near times Square) in the 70s, or Chicago's Midway Airport Terminal around Y2k.  The latter makes LAX look nice

I fully concur on Midway, though I'm surprised Charles de Gaulle or Schipol have not been mentioned yet

I was about to mention CdeG with its concrete doughnut - although Chicago O'Hare in the late 1980s was grim with the ambience of an underground car park.

O'Hare caused Professor Larrington to queueueueue for so long at immigration in 2009 that she was able to learn yet another FOREIGN language so she was deeply unimpressed with my plane->spark up fag outside terminal time of forty minutes later that same year   But all airports are horrid to some degree.  Anyone who goes around saying “I like airports, me!” is very obviously a nutter and wants badly to be shunned.

[ian]

Continuing on the transportation theme, I will suggest the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Bus Terminal (near times Square) in the 70s, or Chicago's Midway Airport Terminal around Y2k.  The latter makes LAX look nice

All airports compete in their existential cheerlessness. Catchment areas for people who want to be somewhere else, Boschean soul sorters. At least they have bars. Señor Larrers already mentioned Atlanta, which should be the top of everyone's list, I'd automatically discount any flight option that included it. I don't mind LAX, but I'm one of the few people that enjoys visiting LA. They've turned the Tom Bradley terminal into a glorified Westfield though. They've done the same with parts of Hell too.

[Mr Larrington]

They've turned the Tom Bradley terminal into a glorified Westfield though. They've done the same with parts of Hell too.

Oh yes.  I had cause to visit Stratford-upon-Bow Back Rivers a couple of months ago.  If it hadn’t been for the theatre still nestling forlornly in the middle of the chrome'n'glass monstrosities I'd never have guessed it was the same place I used to pass through commuting from Leytonstone to Southwark more years ago than I care to contemplate.  Not that the place was particularly wholesome in the early 1990s, mind.

[ian]

I think the terminal genuinely is a Westfield, though I am sure there are other temples to commercial orison. Ironically, Tom Bradley is most associated not with gaudy commercialism but urban conflagration.

[PeteB99]

The Tom Bradley terminal at LAX is the only place in the USA I've ever been to (just to change planes on the way to Baja Sur).

Excited on the way out, bored and tired on the way back although the trip home was enlivened by the customs unpacking my bags completely and examining everything.*

Why is everything packed in plastic bags sir? The reply that I'd just spent 10 days sea kayaking and the bag had spent a lot of its holiday in the bottom of a leaky boat that had been pensioned off from carrying anything important like fish didn't seem to be a valid excuse. 

* had to laugh when one of them took my tube of toothpaste and squeezed half an inch out onto the back of his hand. If that had been plastic explosive he might have spread the checkin section over most of downtown LA

[cygnet]

No mention of Birmingham New St yet?

I found the Catedral de Granada deeply unpleasant, but not as much as "inside" the Colosseum.

[Peter]

Went to what’s left of Belsen once but I was a very small Mr Larrington and couldn’t take it all in.  Likewise Hitler’s mountain lair above Berchtesgaden, which had a really cool lift.

I visited Belsen as a teenager on a "lest we forget" trip with the Green Jackets cadet battalon.  By then it was mostly huge grassed mounds with tablets saying things like "under here 10,000 people are buried".  So it didn't have quite the impact the ruins might have had.  Jaw-dropping, nevertheless.  I've also been into some official "amt" in Dusseldorf (early 70s) which had apparently been Gestapo HQ.  It had paternoster lifts, (which we also had at university).  Wonder if that's what was at Berchtesgaden, Molesworth?  Mention of university reminds me, I have also stood on the terraces of Newcastle Arabia's ground, St James's Park, which qualifies now, by association.

[Kim]

No mention of Birmingham New St yet?

Certainly a strong contender.  Especially the old underpass level, where you could die of old age waiting for one of the lifts that went to surface level, where you'd eventually appear behind the bins.

Continuing the dimly lit Brutalist monstrosities with noxious odours theme, I'll nominate the pathology block of Northwick Park Hospital.  Not that it's been the same since they banned staff from smoking in the office areas.

[Mr Larrington]

The lift at the Kehlsteinhaus (aka “Eagle's Nest”) is accessed down a tunnel bored straight into the mountain and looks like this inside:



Green leather and polished copper.  Made nearly as big an impression on a 5-yo Mr Larrington as the noise made by a Maserati Ghibli as it took off from the adjacent lane at the border crossing from Austria earlier that same day

[Wowbagger]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1688081.stm

This one. I went there once only, to visit the HMCE office that was there. I had travelled from Southend fairly early, so arrived in Brutal about lunchtime. After 2 hours in the building I felt really unwell - bad headache, nauseous etc. I made my apologies to my colleagues and walked back to the Britannia hotel next to Lime Street station. On the way I passed a newsagent with the Liverpool Echo on display. Beneath the headline "Official: working here makes you sick!" was a picture of St. John's House, Brutal. After half an hour walking in the lovely fresh air that is present in central Liverpool, I felt a lot better.

This must have been in the early 1990s. It must have been a year or two later that the shopping centre I had walked through on leaving Brutal station hit the news headlines because Jamie Bulger was abducted from there.

[Auntie Helen]

I have visited several concentration camps over the years and they are all very powerful but somehow the ovens at Theresienstadt affected me more, perhaps because an elderly Jewish couple were with us on the tour (this was about 20 years ago) plus a stupid redneck American republican who would undoubtedly be a Trumper now. And the American said the Germans had made the ovens inefficiently small, the Americans would have made them bigger and better.

That comment, made in such a place in the hearing of those people, will never leave me.

[Hot Flatus]

Americans were at their worst 20-30 years ago, post-crumbling of the Soviet bloc. They just can't help themselves. That insane hubris.

I remember being down some tunnels in Vinh Mohc in what was north Vietnam in 2001. The tunnels were right next to the DMZ border on the coast, and were tunnels for living, not fighting.

The vn guide said that even though there were US warships moored offshore they hadn't shelled the area because they didn't know the tunnels were there. Some yank cunt piped up "oh we knew they were there".

He didn't know, but the cognitive dissonance was just too great and he had to open his stupid fat fucking yank mouth.

[Peter]

On the travels during which I experienced the Dusseldorf Gestapo HQ, I also worked on short-term jobs in Cologne.  One of these was loading WC pedestals onto wagons.  There were three sizes and I was told that the largest size was for hotels where Americans stayed...

[Cudzoziemiec]

I've only been to one concentration camp (not sure there's a need to visit more than one), Majdanek, a relatively small one but the jarring thing is it's not out in the middle of a forest but right on the edge of town. In fact, I remember going to look at a flat to rent and the owner felt obliged to point out that you could see the concentration camp from the windows, calling it "a rather sad view". But in terms of the buildings there, the ones that most left an impression on me were the ovens, just two of them, but with a dissection table and a sluice in the middle of the room, and a room full of shoes taken from victims. (Who made those ovens? Can you imagine the ordering process? "Is that Schmidt's bakery equipment Gmbh? We want two ovens, about 2m long and 1m wide.")

[Cudzoziemiec]

Going back to transport, I nominate the Greyhound bus station in Cleveland, Ohio. Bus stations are usually unpleasant but this is the only place I've ever seen where the toilet cubicles had no doors, presumably as a measure against drug takers.

[Peter]

Doors, drugs... there's a certain congruity.

[Mr Larrington]

Going back to transport, I nominate the Greyhound bus station in Cleveland, Ohio. Bus stations are usually unpleasant but this is the only place I've ever seen where the toilet cubicles had no doors, presumably as a measure against drug takers.

They only fitted doors to the cubicles in the bogs at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1966, after Graham Hill complained.  To further stick it to the USAnians, he then won the '500' at his first attempt.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Doors, drugs... there's a certain congruity.

Is that your taxi or a delivery from Morrisons?

[mllePB]

For me, the Berlin Olympic Stadium.

Viler than the gas chamber building at Sachsenhausen.

Why the Olympic Stadium? Because of its symbolism. Its brutalism. And the pure evil that I felt, as we stood where Hitler did.

I visited this not long after the Wall came down and there was a huge American Evangelical meeting underway there. The whole ambiance felt very strange.

[Kim]

Going back to transport, I nominate the Greyhound bus station in Cleveland, Ohio. Bus stations are usually unpleasant but this is the only place I've ever seen where the toilet cubicles had no doors, presumably as a measure against drug takers.

They only fitted doors to the cubicles in the bogs at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1966, after Graham Hill complained.  To further stick it to the USAnians, he then won the '500' at his first attempt.

USAnians don't really seem to have grokked the purpose of toilet doors, and seem determined to molish them as ineffective as possible.  Particularly in high-traffic public buildings, schools and the like.  I expect there's some sort of underlying racism reason for it, as that seems to be the explanation for most quirks of the USAnian built environment.

[rogerzilla]

I've only been to one concentration camp (not sure there's a need to visit more than one), Majdanek, a relatively small one but the jarring thing is it's not out in the middle of a forest but right on the edge of town. In fact, I remember going to look at a flat to rent and the owner felt obliged to point out that you could see the concentration camp from the windows, calling it "a rather sad view". But in terms of the buildings there, the ones that most left an impression on me were the ovens, just two of them, but with a dissection table and a sluice in the middle of the room, and a room full of shoes taken from victims. (Who made those ovens? Can you imagine the ordering process? "Is that Schmidt's bakery equipment Gmbh? We want two ovens, about 2m long and 1m wide.")

The Topf company, who knew very well what they were for, since they helped commission them on site.

They tried to relaunch as a crematorium equipment firm after the war but, oddly, the brand was a bit Ratnered and it failed.

[Canardly]

Coventry post WW2 has to be in there somewhere. (I have been to Bergen Belsen).

[barakta]

Aston Webb C Block, University of Birmingham. Makes me ill within 2 minutes of being in there due to evil lighting.

The Business School building of Manchester Metropolitan University is similarly evil and illness inducing. Estates told me they have lots of staff off sick a lot with migraines and flu cos it's Just Wrong, but cos it's new and cost £££millions no one will redo it.

The employment tribunal building on Hill Street in Birmingham.

[rr]

Aston Webb C Block, University of Birmingham. Makes me ill within 2 minutes of being in there due to evil lighting.

The Business School building of Manchester Metropolitan University is similarly evil and illness inducing. Estates told me they have lots of staff off sick a lot with migraines and flu cos it's Just Wrong, but cos it's new and cost £££millions no one will redo it.

The employment tribunal building on Hill Street in Birmingham.

Similarly, Chelmsford cathedral, has mini fainting and puking within 10 minutes.

Sent from my motorola edge 20 using Tapatalk

[hellymedic]

Your all spelling Bristol Partway wrong!

 

My memories are SO varied!
A dire halt after an unsuccessful job interview in winter, alighting point for the Brevet Cymru or CTC National Dinner & Prize giving…

Passed through yesterday...