Vikings Stadium Evidently One of Ugliest Buildings on the Planet
Dustin Baker
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The Minnesota Vikings playoff loss to the New York Giants last was unpleasant, and the team’s stadium, on the whole, is even uglier, according to a British building supply company.
U.S. Bank Stadium opened in 2016, has served as the Vikings home since, and has offered Minnesota the NFL’s fourth-best homefield advantage in the last seven years (the Vikings are 39-18 [.684] in home games since 2016). It just isn’t a pretty building, say our friends across the pond.
Vikings Stadium Evidently One of Ugliest Buildings on the Planet
BuildWorld is responsible for the “building rankings” and described the process, “Buildworld curated a long list of buildings from around the world, the UK and the U.S. that are often said to be ugly. We identified all the design-themed tweets about these buildings on Twitter. Then we used a sentiment analysis tool called HuggingFace to analyze the percentage of tweets that were negative about each building’s design.”
In the category involving U.S. Bank Stadium, called “The Top 10 Eyesore Buildings in the U.S.,” the Vikings house checked in at No. 7, followed by Thompson Center in Chicago, the Alamodome in San Antonio, and the Florida State Capitol building. According to BuildWorld, 15.47% of all evaluatory tweets regarding U.S. Bank Stadium contained criticism.
Weird, eh?
In fact, in order of ugliest-first, these are the least attractive buildings in the United States, per BuildWorld:
- J. Edgar Hoover Building (Washington D.C.)
- Boston City Hall (Boston)
- Verizon Building (New York)
- Watergate Complex (Washington D.C.)
- Denver International Airport (Denver)
- Trump Tower (Las Vegas)
- U.S. Bank Stadium (Minneapolis)
- Thompson Center (Chicago)
- Alamodome (San Antonio)
- Florida State Capitol (Tallahassee)
Overall, the ranking outfit classified the Vikings stadium as the 12th-ugliest building on the planet.
About the ugliest building in the country, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the British site wrote, “Over one-third of tweets about the J. Edgar Hoover Building are negative in sentiment. And yes, it’s not pretty — but there’s a certain Minecraft-y charm about the blocky brutalist monolith. The FBI HQ was fashionable, practical and even a little utopian when it was designed in the 1960s (an open courtyard for agents to eat lunch, files safely archived deep in the core of the building). But today, its very bulk evokes the worst of 20th-century politics and the 21st-century surveillance state.”
Three years ago, ESPN ranked all NFL stadiums and plopped U.S. Bank Stadium at No. 5, totally contracting the BuildWorld theories. At the time of the article’s publication, ESPN’s Courtney Cronin noted about the Vikings home, “While U.S. Bank is only 4 years old, its traditions, like the chill-inducing Skol clap, sounding of the Gjallarhorn prior to kickoff and the fire-breathing dragon tunnel that players run out of, make it worthy of being at the top of this list.”
All of the BuildWorld data was collected last October.
Dustin Baker is a political scientist who graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2007. Subscribe to his daily YouTube Channel, VikesNow. He hosts a podcast with Bryant McKinnie, which airs every Wednesday with Raun Sawh and Sal Spice. His Vikings obsession dates back to 1996. Listed guilty pleasures: Peanut Butter Ice Cream, ‘The Sopranos,’ and The Doors (the band).
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