I always thought this house qualified as supremely ugly. It is (was?) on the beach of the Caspian Sea near Rasht, Iran. This was an area where wealthy Iranians built summer homes prior to the Iranian revolution. I photographed it while on a work assignment in the area in 1976.



The previous year, I had been on a work assignment in Poland, where I had occasion to visit the Ministry of Culture building in Warsaw. I don't have any of my pictures of it available, but here's one harvested off the web. The saying in Warsaw was that it was the best place from which to view the city, because it was the only place where you couldn't see the Ministry of Culture building. It was (obviously) a gift from Stalin.



For what it's worth, the Oldenborg Library at Pomona College in Claremont, California is ostensibly the source for inspiration of the Borg cube. One of the Star Trek writers studied at Pomona, and has never denied it was the source of the term.