The 20 Ugliest Colleges in the USA, via Cynical-C. Of these, I’ve only ever visited the University of Maryland, College Park, and two of the SUNY schools (Albany and Binghamton). Maryland actually offered me a couple of small scholarships to attend, but, as the fates would have it, I opted for Penn State. I’m actually a little surprised not to see my alma mater on the list. I’ve joked, on more than one occasion, that Penn State has a really good architectural school…but apparently none of its alum ever come back to design the university’s buildings. Which, gazing at some of the alternatives, is probably unfair. I actually grew to quite like the University Park campus — as an English major, lord knows you see just about every corner of it — and it could certainly be uglier.

2 thoughts on “”

  1. I’m not surprised both Harvey Mudd and Pitzer College made the list. What I am surprised about, though, its that the whole Claremont Colleges conglomeration didn’t make it as a single entry. Not only are all six campuses thrown together cheek-by-jowl into a single tangled mess (where I inevitably manage to get lost, no matter how many times I’ve been there), but they all share the same architectural sins mentioned for HMC and Pitzer. It seems that no two adjacent buildings look even remotely alike, and some of the buildings show questionable design choices.

    At one point in the late ’50s/early ’60s some architect (I forget his name) was pretty much given free rein to fill the campuses with variations on the same basic heavy-slabby-walls-and-huge-columns-holding-up-a-paper-thin-roof monstrosity (one of which is depicted in the Harvey Mudd photo on that blog). He also left a few of those turd droppings around the larger city of Claremont, too. (Which is a shame, since Claremont’s a really beautiful city otherwise.) Little by little over the years, most of the open space between those buildings has been swallowed up with a hodge-podge of competing styles as the colleges have tried to expand while essentially being “landlocked” (that is, there’s no place to grow outward since all that land is taken up with residential or commerical development).

    The University of La Verne, my own alma mater/employer (which isn’t too far from the Claremont Colleges) hasn’t fared too much better in it’s architectural development, but there at least seems to be a plan in place for improvement. There are a lot of aging buildings on campus, but the good ones are being restored while the bad ones are being removed and replaced with new development that they’re trying to keep stylistically consistent.

    (Wow. This is more than I’d ever thought I’d write about architecture in my lifetime.)

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