Ugliest Campuses and Prettiest Campuses

LFWB_dad · May 31, 2006, 5:40pm

^^^^^^^^^
The odds are good, but the goods are odd!!

gianscolere1 · May 31, 2006, 5:53pm

University of Chicago is also the best campus I've ever seen (in comparison to Northwestern, Harvard, Emory, and MIT).

parent2noles · May 31, 2006, 9:38pm

Florida State has a beautiful campus.

MissSuperFantastic · May 31, 2006, 9:42pm

Southern Cal as in...USC?

nerdnirvana · June 1, 2006, 12:34am

as a los angeles native, usc depresses me. it's not pretty. it's in da ghetto. and not just the kind-of ghetto, the real ghetto, as in i'm afraid to go there DURING THE DAY.

shoe66 · June 2, 2006, 12:45pm

My bad, my bad.
I quickly edited my post that mentioned U Chicago, but I see that in the span of five minutes, somebody had already said I was an idiot.
I have never really seen U Chicago. I've seen it from the outside, in the dead of a Chicago winter, and it failed to impress me. But that's no reason for me to have included it, even briefly, on a list of ugliest campuses.
All of the others I mentioned, however, I have first-hand, walk-around/drive-around knowledge of.
Including Yale. And yes, I immediately sensed the campus' neighborhood problem. But the campus itself just reeks of history, and to me it seemed a place that said that some serious educating goes on here.

CalX · June 2, 2006, 2:55pm

nerdnirvana:

[quote]
ok, i was referring specifically to the big nasty square-ish buildings. i so would have joined the vegetarian coop if i had gone there. berkeley is gorgeous, or at least the hill part, but the giant ugly buildings made me want to puke.
the library was SWEET though.
i just remembered that.
now i wish i was going there.

[/quote]

Like I said, if don't like the big square dorms, you have the option of staying at any other dorms like Clark Kerr
<a href="http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/peter/ibs/ibc0019.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/peter/ibs/ibc0019.jpg</a>
<a href="http://www-als.lbl.gov/icess/ClarkKerr2.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://www-als.lbl.gov/icess/ClarkKerr2.jpg</a>

or Bowles Hall
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...1/17/Bowles.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...1/17/Bowles.jpg</a>

or a number of coops like Cloyne Court
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsackett/8675004/%5B/url%5D">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsackett/8675004/</a>

or International House or Wada (your Jr and SR yrs)
<a href="http://www.emjr.org/cal/football/2002/wsuGame/336.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://www.emjr.org/cal/football/2002/wsuGame/336.jpg</a>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gn...58106732&size=l%5B/url%5D">http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gn...58106732&size=l</a>
<a href="http://static.flickr.com/30/42072238_d7169f9954.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://static.flickr.com/30/42072238_d7169f9954.jpg</a>

Funnily enough, most Cal students actually prefer the big ugly square buildings, because those have the most intense social life. The Berkeley board on this site has many incoming students who are whining at ending up in the pretty dorms as opposed to the busy ones. As well, the view from the upper half of these buildings is quite stunning, in all directions (green hills, city or Bay/Golden Gate views.) all the rooms have big windows.

semiserious · June 2, 2006, 7:39pm

Something that always strikes me when reading posts like this is how different everyone's tastes are! I've seen people critize what I looked for and laud praises on what I hated. Personally, I LOVE red brick, so I was in love with UVa, Wake Forest, and Vanderbilt. Gothic can be beautiful, too, though often it becomes somewhat depressing. The Gothic part of Duke's campus was quite nice...the rest of it was boring. What irritates me, personally, is when the architecture doesn't match. I wanted each building at my college to look more or less the same, to share a common architecture theme--I wanted it to be clearly indentifiable as a part of the college. NOTHING irritating me more than Berkeley's complete and total inability to stick to any one particular style of architecture. Walking through the Berkeley campus was like a walk through a museum of architecture through the ages, through some beautiful spanish-influenced stone buildings right on up to the most hideously concieved modern architecture you can imagine. :/

This is part of the reason I love UVA so much! All of the building MATCH. They aren't all identical, but they quite nearly all share similar properties of red brick, white accents, and lots of grass and magnolia trees and flowers. Simply breathtaking and absolutely perfect, IMO. Even the brand-spankin'-new John Paul Jones arena matches--none of that crappy modern architecture, built to fit in. Ah, so wonderful, I love UVA.

one_big_tree · June 3, 2006, 8:34am

<a href="http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/icpr2004/cambridge/images/DSCF0003.jpg%5B/url%5D">http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/icpr2004/cambridge/images/DSCF0003.jpg</a>

CalX · June 3, 2006, 1:00pm

Can't beat the manicured rain-drenched lawns on English grounds. But of course you're not allowed to walk on them. It would be fun to put some cleats on and have a pickup soccer game on that lawn, until somebody kicks the ball through a 500-yr old stained glass window...

semiserious, nice pics, UVA is definitely up there, if only because it set the style and mold for that style, but I wouldn't trade UVA's brick style for Berkeley's white granite neo-classical (not spanish, that was only the style of Clark Kerr and International House dorms which aren't in the campus proper.) And definitely not the sites. I also like the architectural variety on campus, it kind of works well with the broader diversity of the campus community.

huskem55 · June 3, 2006, 1:33pm

<a href="http://www.conncoll.edu/aboutcc/phototour/%5B/url%5D">http://www.conncoll.edu/aboutcc/phototour/</a>

semiserious · June 4, 2006, 10:02am

Different strokes for different folks I suppose, CalX. :)

Petya555 · August 23, 2009, 8:28am

Stanford stanford stanford stanford stanford stanford stanford stanford … Stanford.

malibu727 · August 23, 2009, 2:39pm

Way to dig up an old thread, UCSC hands down beautiful.

europegrad · August 23, 2009, 2:46pm

I’ll not consider my univeristy. Apart from that, from the campuses I’ve managed to visit, I’d say U. of Idaho is the most beautiful campus in America for sure.

I don’t like urban campuses though. They just don’t get the feeling. Irrespective of its academic reputation, student experience at Columbia University, for me, would really be frustrating: taking the subway to reach the buildings they have in South Manhattan, sharing the campus main trhoughfare with tons of commuters, taking the subway (again). Well, I really didn’t like Columbia in this aspect, and I don’t like NYC at all.

Alix2012 · August 23, 2009, 4:09pm

^ Columbia has a beautiful campus on the upper West side, you don’t need the subway to get to class…people say the same thing about NYU, that you need the subway, but they don’t realize it’s the Med or Dental buildings in the different area, not the Undergrad college. well either you’re a city person or not, i’d personally hate to be stuck in Idaho!

Prettiest: William & Mary, Bryn Mawr, Princeton, UVA, Williams, Cornell, SUNY Geneseo

Ugliest: SUNY Albany, SUNY Stonybrook, SUNY Bing…DREXEL ughhh

these are just the ones i’ve visited, i’m sure there’s prettier/uglier. In general, I like gothic, georgian, classical, and hate the “taco bell” style often seen in florida

themoonisdown · August 23, 2009, 4:42pm

I must admit; in choosing between Berkeley and UCLA, the latter won me over based largely on aesthetic preference.

collegeboss · August 23, 2009, 8:14pm

UCLA has an amazing campus.
William and Mary is nice too.

Stanford has a pretty campus, too bad the people who go there aren’t.

AbbyP · August 23, 2009, 8:17pm

Princeton is gorgeous. I also thought Flagler College in Florida was pretty. When I visited that school I’d never seen real palm trees before, so I was pretty much in awe.

Baelor · August 31, 2009, 6:41am

Princeton by far; no campus I have been to or seen pictures of save Cambridge can evn compare.

Oh, and as someone who was accepted to and visited Stanford, I can say that it was definitely fugly. I was actually disappointed that the campus, essentially a large, green complex of Taco Bells of varying shapes and sizes, fell so abysmally short of the hype.

My sister who went there for crew camp felt the same way. Truly an overrated example of fug.

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