San Francisco’s Coit Tower has come in at #3 on Buildworld‘s list of the most-loved buildings in the United States. The company used sentiment-tracking artificial intelligence to analyze tweets mentioning 6,000 of the most famous buildings in the world, and 63% of tweets mentioning Coit Tower were praising the building’s architecture.
Coit Tower came in third behind Pennsylvania’s Fallingwater, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous homes; and the Empire State Building in New York. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the buildings in the top 10 are located in NYC — see the full list below.
- Fallingwater (Mill Run, PA) – 65.1%
- Empire State Building (New York City, NY) – 63%
- Coit Tower (San Francisco, CA) – 58.3%
- Flatiron Building (New York City, NY) – 56.5%
- Brooklyn Museum (New York City, NY) – 55.1%
- Graceland (Memphis, TN) – 52.9%
- One World Trade Center (New York City, NY) – 51.9%
- New York Public Library (New York City, NY) – 49.5%
- Stanley Hotel (Estes Park, CO) – 46.1%
- Chrysler Building (New York City, NY) – 43.9%
To compile the list, Buildworld created a seed list of 6,000 famous buildings around the world and then searched Twitter using keywords to find tweets mentioning the design of the buildings. The gathered tweets were then manually filtered and fed into AI tool Huggingface, which analyzed the sentiment of the tweets. Each building was ranked by the percentage of positive tweets about its design. The analyzed tweets were all in English, so the list is biased toward the sentiment of English speakers.
U.S. buildings did not crack the top ten of the international list, which was topped by Japan’s Osaka Castle which had 97.5% of tweets praising its design. Other buildings in the top 10 centered around European architecture with Ely Cathedral in England at #2 and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam at #3.
Coit Tower has embellished San Francisco’s iconic skyline atop Telegraph Hill since its construction in 1933. It was named for Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who left a bequest upon her death in 1929 “for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city I have always loved.” Architect Henry Howard designed the tower with a simple fluted Art Deco design, which was ultimately chosen because it fit the project’s small $125,000 budget. Visitors can travel to the top of the 212-foot-high tower and marvel at 360° views of the city, or head into the base of the tower to see 26 Depression-era frescoes commissioned by the U.S. Government’s Public Works of Art Project (PWAP).