Did you know that the Eiffel Tower had a petition against it signed by some of the greatest writers in France?

Or perhaps that George Orwell wished someone had blown up the Sagrada Familia?

Or that a London skyscraper got a nickname so rude the papers barely printed it?

If you didn’t you will love the article of today, as we will talk about 7 some of the most famous buildings in the world which were initially despised and hated upon, before becoming national monuments and landmarks!

Let’s dive right in!🙂

1. In Paris, 300 Artists Signed a Petition

to Stop the Eiffel Tower

We start our journey of discovery in Paris, it was 14 February 1887,

Before the tower was even a third built, the newspaper Le Temps published a protest on its front page.

The protest was originally signed by around 300 people, one for each planned metre of the tower’s height, and the list was genuinely staggering:

• Guy de Maupassant, famous novelist of that time
• Alexandre Dumas fils, playwright
• Charles Gounod, influential composer
• Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera!
• Émile Zola (who later withdrew his name

All these people of culture, collectively called the future Eiffel Tower a “useless and monstrous” project, and compared it to a Tower of Babel that would humiliate French taste.

Pretty harsh if you ask me eheh

And here is the detail that most people don’t know or forget: the Eiffel tower was only ever meant to stand for 20 years!

Gustave Eiffel’s agreement gave him rights to the site for two decades, after which it was to be dismantled.

It survived largely because it turned out to be a superb radio transmission mast — and by then Paris had quietly fallen in love with it!

And what about the critiques? Most withdrew thei accusations and grew to love the Eiffel tower too!

To give you an example, Maupassant reportedly ate lunch in the tower’s restaurant regularly, because, according to him, it was “the only place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at it” 😉

2. In Barcelona, George Orwell Wanted Someone

to Blow Up the Sagrada Familia!

In “Homage to Catalonia”, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell went to see Gaudí’s basilica and came away wildly unimpressed.

He described it as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” noted that its spires were “exactly the shape of hock bottles,” and then delivered this line:

“I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.”

LOL!

Such ironic yet harsh words from a published famous author, in a published book, expressing regret that a cathedral survived a revolution! 🙂

Ninety years later, the Sagrada Familia is one of the most visited buildings on Earth! 

And it just reached an extraordinary milestone: on 20 February 2026, the final piece of the central Tower of Jesus Christ was installed, bringing the basilica to 172.5 metres and making it the tallest church in the world.

Construction began in 1882.

That’s 144 years… and the timing is remarkable, because 2026 also marks 100 years since Gaudí’s death!

When Gaudí died, less than a quarter of the building was complete.

He knew he would never see it finished, and famously said his client “God”, was in no hurry:) 

If you’re going to visit it, la Sagrada Familia Tickets are worth sorting well in advance — this is not a walk-up attraction, and post-completion demand has been intense, so book WEEKS in advance!

Quick Tip: go late afternoon on a sunny day. The west-facing stained glass turns the whole nave orange and red, and it’s magical! And in our opinion…Orwell was wrong too! 🙂

3. In Sydney, The Opera House Went 15 Times

Over Budget and Its Architect Walked Out!

This one is the most painful story on this listicle!

Jørn Utzon’s original design for the Sydney Opera House was estimated at $7 million in 1957.

The final cost came in around $102 million in 1973!

That is roughly fifteen times over budget.

During the construction, the press called it “Utzon’s Folly.”

Locals nicknamed it “the Nuns’ Scrum” (as the roof shells apparently resembling a huddle of nuns in headdresses).

The critic Clive James described it as “a typewriter full of oyster shells”.

Then, in February 1966, after a dispute over money owed to him and constant political interference, Utzon resigned, left Australia and never returned (and also never saw the finished building in person!).

The construction nevertheless ended, and the SOA opened in 1973.

In 2007, the building became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is now one of the most recognisable structures on the planet and a symbol of Australia as a whole!

Utzon was eventually reconciled with the Opera House late in life and consulted on renovations remotely, but he died in 2008 without ever standing inside the thing he designed 🙁

4. In London, they Called a building

“The Erotic Gherkin”

Ok, this is one that will make you wonder what drug the architect was actually smoking when designing it!

“Norman Foster’s tower” at 30 St Mary Axe, is a name that probably you’ve never heard before!

That is probably because, when the design of the NF Tower was unveiled around year 2000, the British press took one look at the shape and reached, immediately and enthusiastically, for the most obvious British joke available.

They christened it “the erotic gherkin.”

The nickname stuck so hard that the building is now officially, universally, and affectionately just “the Gherkin”: on tourist signs, in estate agent listings and even on Google maps!

Even Prince Charles weighed in, more delicately than the tabloids, describing it as resembling “a giant glass shaggy ink cap” (that’s a mushroom, for the non-mycologists among us xD).

 Despite the initial despise, the building opened on 28 April 2004 and in that same year it won the RIBA Stirling Prize, Britain’s most prestigious architecture award in a unanimous decision by the judges.

So within roughly four years it went from national punchline to the most decorated new building in the country…. howdy England! 

Extra fun fact: London now has an entire ecosystem of these nicknames: the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie, the Shard… but it was the Gherkin that started it 😉

5. In Berlin, the Atheist Tower

was weirdly received after

projecting a Giant Cross

This is easily our favourite story in the whole article! xD

This time we are in Berlin, Germany!

In 1965, in the capital city of Germany started the construction of Berlin’s Fernsehturm (TV TOWER) in the East German half of the divided city.

At 368 metres it was designed as a (typical Russian) piece of pure propaganda: a steel needle proving the technological might of socialism, visible from every corner of Berlin, including, pointedly, from the capitalist West.

The sphere near the top was clad in 140 stainless steel panels and it was meant to gleam impressively in the sunlight.

As it happens with many russian “propaganda projects” though, when the tower opened on 3 October 1969 something went absurdly weird when the sun hit that sphere!

The curved steel panels reflected the light in the shape of an enormous cross!

The “officially atheist” East German state had just built, at enormous expense, the largest crucifix in the country, and mounted it 200 metres above the city where nobody could miss it! 😅😅🤣🤣🤣

Berliners immediately named it “Rache des Papstes” (the Pope’s Revenge).

The Russian authorities were, by all accounts, furious. They investigated coating the sphere in non-reflective material, sanding it smooth, painting it… yet none of it worked and the cross remains still visible there today!

A building designed to humiliate religion ended up advertising it, permanently, in the middle of a communist capital. Just LOL!

6. In New York the Edge Opened,

and Then Closed Days Later!

Remember the 300 French artists who tried to stop the Eiffel Tower in 1887?

New York did the exact same thing, seventy years later.

In December 1956, three years before the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened its doors, 21 artists published an open letter in the New York Times begging the foundation to reconsider Frank Lloyd Wright’s design.

Their complaint was blunt.

Wright’s spiral was, they wrote, “an unsuitable background for the display of painting and sculpture.”

The curved walls. The sloping floor. The ramp that forces you to look at art while walking downhill.

None of it, they argued, worked for actually showing paintings.

 The petition was signed by most of the American art establishment of the 1950s against a museum built to house their own work! Between those there were Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline too, just to name a few!

Despite the big names’ requests, wright, characteristically, did not budge.

He died in April 1959, six months before the Guggenheim NY opened.

The museum opened anyway, took the criticism for years, and then quietly won.

The spiral ramp is now one of the most photographed interiors on Earth, and the building is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Architects who once called it a hostile container for art now teach it as one of the most important buildings of the 20th century.

Extra Note: The artists were right about one thing, mind you: hanging a flat painting on a curved, tilted wall genuinely is a nightmare. Curators have been quietly cursing Wright about it for sixty-five years 😄

 

Back to now, New York never stopped having this kind of arguments…

Six decades after the Guggenheim, the city of NY approved another crazy project, namely the Edge at Hudson Yards, a glass deck cantilevered 1,100 feet above Manhattan with a transparent floor.

Here also, the reviews split within a week of opening.

Some call it the most spectacular view in the city; others find it small, crowded and overpriced.

Give it fifty years, and we’ll see who was right this time.

Quick Tip: Edge NYC tickets are timed-entry, and the sunset slots go first.

7. In Boston, the “New” City Hall

Never Got Forgiven

We wanted to end with a counter-example, because not every hated building gets rehabilitated xD

The, at that time, “new” Boston City Hall opened in 1968 and the design was deemed ugly by many: a vast upside-down concrete wedge and one of the most uncompromising Brutalist buildings in America.

Bostonians have never made peace with it!

In 2008, a travel website poll named it the ugliest building in the world, and the label went viral.

In 2013, a design magazine put it on a list titled “25 Buildings to Demolish Right Now.”

A more recent survey ranked it the second ugliest building in the United States and fourth ugliest in the world, and in a local reader poll 61% gave it the maximum possible ugliness score.

And yet, despite all the critics, the city has now made it an official historic landmark!

Not because everyone suddenly loves it, but because after nearly sixty years of abuse, Boston decided the building had become part of the city’s story regardless.

Basically, the city hall became a landmark thanks to its un-arguable ugliness! xD

Sometimes that’s how it goes: you don’t win people over, you just outlast them!:)

So Why Do We Get It Wrong

So Consistently?

Looking at all seven together, we noticed a pattern that often shows up.

Those buildings we’ve seen that got attacked hardest weren’t inherently ugly (well, except that last city hall of course ahah).

They were unfamiliar!

Iron where people expected stone, glass where they expected masonry, curves instead of corners, shells instead of a roof…

Every one of them broke a visual rule the public did not know had until somebody broke it!

And the ones we still dislike, like Boston City Hall, tend to be the ones that took something away (a view, a skyline or simply a sense of human scale) rather than the ones that simply looked strange.

Strange but creative design gets forgiven with time, while lazy design gets punished!n a

Quick Tip: stories like these almost never appear on information panels and that is exactly why we like to discover them! If you like them too, remember that enthusiast travel guides and tour leaders are often what makes the sharing of such local knowledge possible.

If you want to add a layer of culture to your trips, we can Toursaroundglobe.com, an incredible resource to compare what’s available at different destinations! 🙂

Conclusions 🙂

And here we are at the end 🙂

Honestly, we came out of this research, liking these buildings more, and the arguments about them even more!

What we learned on this journey of discovery is that, buildings that everyone likes immediately, are usually a building that didn’t try anything.

The ones we travel across the world to see are, almost without exception, the ones that made somebody furious first. They are bold projects that challanged the conventional and because of that became memorable!

Before you go, as always we would like to ask you:

• Which of these seven did you not know was ever hated?
• Is there a building in your own city that everyone complains about?
• And last but not least, be honest: do you actually like Boston City Hall? ;D

Let us know in the comments below! 😀

Here are a few other articles you might enjoy:

Behind the Marble: 7 Fun Facts About Italy’s Greatest Landmarks

7 Surprising Fun Facts about Melbourne that You Didn’t Know!

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂