You needn’t be an architecture critic to know that a big city has its full share of sub-par buildings, the mundane landscape of structures summoned to life with no aspiration beyond the bottom line.

And then there are the eyesores that transcend the mundane, so to speak. Instead of fading into the landscape, another sad shrug, they stick in the craw and make you recoil, time after time after time.

To illustrate this sorry truth, here’s my subjective Top 10 travesties that still bring a shudder, eight from San Francisco and two from Oakland: squandered opportunities, out-of-scale abominations, wardrobe malfunctions of the architectural kind. Because most of them are fairly recent, there’s little chance that something better will take their place in our lifetimes.

via 10 Bay Area buildings we’d be better off without – Urban Landscapes – John King.