A study of online discourse has identified a Welsh railway station as the third ugliest building in the world. Leicestershire-based building materials business Buildworld conducted a study to identify the most maligned structures in the world based on the way they are described on social media.
It curated a list of buildings from around the world, predominantly in the US and the UK, which are often said to be displeasing to the eye. The company sifted through the design-themed tweets about the buildings and used a sentiment analysis tool to analyse the percentage of tweets which were negative about each design.
According to the company, Newport railway station was only beaten on the ugly list by the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh and the J Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC. It was also the only building in Wales to make it onto the list.
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Between 2007 and 2010 the Welsh Government pumped millions into regenerating the station, providing a new bridge and concourses. But it isn’t the first time the rather clinical but modern-looking station has been on the end of criticism over its appearance.
Following the first renovation in 2007, the new development was criticised by RAIL magazine columnist Barry Doe for being at the wrong end of the platform, a lack of seating and generally poor design. The station was nominated in 2011 for the Carbuncle Cup, awarded for the ugliest building of the year.
It hasn’t been all bad news for the station, though. In 2020, the Rail Delivery Group nominated Newport as one of the Welsh stations as a contender for the World Cup of Stations - albeit the station didn't pass the group stages.
On its list, Buildworld said it is better to be ugly than boring: “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.”
Further explaining how it came to its findings, the company added: "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.
"We then searched Twitter for the name of each building plus a set of keywords to obtain all tweets that reflected the public’s opinion regarding its design. The gathered tweets were filtered to ensure they talked about the design of the buildings. We used an AI algorithm from HuggingFace to extract the sentiment from the collected tweets, and then we ranked the buildings based on the percentage of tweets that were negative for each of them.”
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