Marriott Marquis, San Francisco, California

Things start out badly with the San Francisco Marriot Marquis.  First is the name “Marquis,” which, like “Duke” or “Count,” is a hereditary title for a European nobleman.  A very bad fit for a city known for quaint neighborhoods, a farm-to-table food scene and eclectic culture.

Hampton Inn & Suites, Seattle, Washington

With each post we appear to reach a new low.  Welcome to the ugliest, most retch-inducing building yet on Fucked Architect: the Hampton Inn & Suites in Seattle’s Lower Queen Anne.  Thank you, Johnny C.L. Cheng of Cheng & Associates, for designing this.

We despise this building for a number of reasons. It’s made of the same styrofoamy crap that is designed the same way whether it’s in Des Moines Iowa or Seattle. There is no regard to regional climate, local character or culture. The color scheme of turquoise, salmon, beige and brown should be illegal.  Add the procession of blank vertical walls and cheap stacked windows, and then cap it all off with a series of depressing gable roofs.  What do you get?  A women’s prison.

TriBeCa: A Fucked Architect Intervention

We’re not sure who exactly is responsible for naming the mixed-use development in Seattle’s Lower Queen Anne neighborhood. Our guess is that it was the developer, Milliken Development Group, who proposed the irrelevant name while the architect, Sienna Architecture, sat there happily nodding and adding up their design fee. Whatever the case, the powers that be allowed the term “TriBeCa” to represent a building in, ahem… Seattle. We know, we know… anyone with an IQ over 80 and/or an education past the 8th grade must be seriously insulted.

Cushing Terrell Architecture

It’s a big day here at FA! We recently came across a body of architectural work so mind-numbingly dull, so superbly mediocre, that we decided to go above and beyond our typical formula. Yes indeed, after a careful review of the Cushing Terrell Architecture website, we realized that it’s time to do something very special. Work of this magnitude deserves something more grandiose than just a simple finger. It’s our pleasure to announce that CTA has won the Fucked Architect Lifetime Achievement Award!

KFC + Taco Time, 201 Mercer St, Seattle Washington

Imagine this for a second: take all the worst characteristics of Bob Barker, Adolf Eichmann, and Belgium’s Leopold II.  Cheesy salesmanship; a disdain for humanity; and environmental destruction. Mix them up and reconstitute them as architectural design.  What do you get?  Something like this creation by Larry K. Cross of Olympic Associates Company.

What makes us think so little about Larry’s work?  To us, these are near perfect examples of environmental rape, visual desecration and cultural prostitution.  Fast food restaurants.

Seattle Street of Dreams

“Casa Montecito” from the 2006 Street of Dreams at Dodd Ranch, Allen Lake by Murphy & Associates

For 25 unfortunate years, the Seattle Street of Dreams promoted neighborhoods full of embarrassingly large, faux traditional homes.  The work commonly featured scaled down versions of European-style “mansions” with auto-courts and stick-on exterior ornaments, an explosion of bad taste that framed the American Dream as incomplete without a side yard and a water feature.  It brainwashed people to think that success demands a gaudy, oversized house with Doric columns and lots of funny little roof pitches.  In reality, the Street of Dreams did more damage to residential architecture than beauty bark.

Belltown Court, Seattle, Washington

David Hewitt of Hewitt Architects did this.

Their website boasts they create “authentic places that enrich the life of our cities now—and in the sustainable future.”  If a replica of a Borg spaceship enriches all those Trekkies in Belltown, Hewitt’s hit the mark with this project.  And all the lawsuits around this building’s design and construction are certainly enriching the lawyers.  But sustainable?  For Hewitt, sustainability is definitely somewhere off in the future: this pig has already been covered in plastic twice to replace all the leaky siding, windows and doors.

The Portland Building, Portland, Oregon

We hate this building.  God hates this building.  Michael Graves completed it in 1982, creating what is said to be the world’s first post-modern building -an icon of post-modernism. Excuse us for a moment; we need to go hunch over the toilet and dry heave.

EMP, Seattle, Washington

We don’t hate Frank Gehry, the architect of the Experience Music Project.  He and his firm have done some of the most iconic buildings in the world –projects that have been real game-changers. It’s just that Seattle really got the burnt weenie with the EMP.

The Basket Building, Zanesville, Ohio

It is with a mixture of sadness and awe that we present to you the Basket Building, a real gem in Ohio created by none other than NBBJ Architects.