Speak Better English with Harry | Episode 571

In this podcast episode, we focus on English adjectives used to describe buildings and places. You will learn how native speakers talk about the size, age, style, and condition of buildings in everyday English. Each adjective is explained in clear, simple language with practical examples to help you understand and use it correctly.

This lesson is ideal for English learners at intermediate and advanced levels who want to improve vocabulary, speaking skills, and descriptive language. It is especially useful for IELTS, TOEFL, and Cambridge English exam preparation, where accurate and varied vocabulary is important for speaking and writing tasks.

By the end of the episode, you will be able to describe buildings more confidently and naturally, whether you are talking about cities, travel, work, or everyday life.

Transcript

0:09

Hi there, this is Harry. Welcome back to Advanced English Lessons with Harry, where I try to help you to get a better understanding of the English language, to help you with your conversational skills, your business English skills, interview skills, whatever your goals are, we're here to help. And for those of you and your friends or family who want one-to-one lessons, well, you know what to do. Just get in touch, www.englishlessonviaskype.com and you can apply for a free trial lesson and we'll be very happy to hear from you and very happy to help you. And in today's advanced English lesson, we're going to look at adjectives. So it's a good vocabulary. And these are adjectives that we will use to describe buildings. So if you have to describe a building, it's not just a big, a small, a tall, you know, wide, whatever. We're going to give you different adjectives to describe different types of building that you might see. And as always, then if you're not used to the words and practice them, check them out, look them up, look at buildings that they might describe so you get an understanding, a better understanding as to what these words will mean. So advanced English lesson with adjectives to describe buildings. I've got 10 of them and I've got actually an 11th, but 10 that I'll go through and give you examples for. So number one, an imposing building. An imposing building is one that really stands out, something really, really big in comparison to everything that's around it. So for example, the Eiffel Tower could be described as a very imposing structure or an imposing building. It really stands out. It's very hard to miss it when you're anywhere in Paris, you will see it. So it's very, very imposing, okay? Or indeed, a very large army barracks in the center of a city could be quite imposing because it might be big, big steel gates, big high walls with barbed wire along the top. So it's quite imposing because when you come to the city, you're very aware of it and you notice it. And it's very seldom that you see people going in and out. So you're not quite sure what's happening behind those big steel gates. So imposing. Number two, nondescript. Well, here's a quite opposite for a building. Nondescript, you'd hardly notice it's there. So somebody might tell you, oh, have you been to the new museum? It's in that building on the High Street. You say, what building is that? Oh, you know, the one near the police station. Oh, you know, I go by that building every day and you'd hardly notice it's there. And I didn't realize it was a museum. It's a strange place to have a museum. And the person may say, well, I think it's only temporary because the old museum has been renovated. So they needed some place to put all the artifacts and to keep it open for the public. So that's why they're using that building. It was the only one available. So something non-descript is you can't really describe it because you can't remember anything memorable about it that would help you to describe it. It's just nondescript. Number three, a very graceful, a graceful building. Well, graceful building is probably a building with a lot of style. So it might be one of the old, old hotels in your city. So it's very graceful because nice pillars on the outside, big long windows with beautiful decorated drapes or curtains, really, really stylish. And you can think back and feel what it might have been like 150, 200 years ago when it was first opened. It would still have been as stylish and graceful as it appears today. So they've spent a lot of money with the upkeep and the renovations, but maintained the gracefulness that it had all those years ago. So very graceful. Number four, innovative. Well, an innovative building is something that's really, really contemporary, very, very modern, and something that really stands out. So it could be a building to do with technology. So the building reflects the type of business that's taking place inside. So, you know, if it was a Google head office or the head office of Facebook or some other big modern IT company, well, of course, then you might describe the building as innovative so that you can only get into it using certain passwords or facial recognition. So when you stand in front of the gates, they only open when you look into a particular machine and it takes your photograph and then the gate opens. It doesn't open automatically. So this would be how you might describe something innovative or something looks at architecture in somewhat of a different way. So there may be storage rooms in the basement instead of car parks. There may be electrical charging points in the car park for every car. So this would be somewhat innovative. So it helps people to deal with the modern way of living to have electric vehicles instead of having diesel or petrol vehicles. So indeed, they could provide each of the apartments with places for parking their bikes inside some sort of rack that makes the best use of space. So this could be really innovative. Number five, tasteless. Well, a tasteless building could be very, very ugly, completely out of sorts with everything else around it. So perhaps you've got an old medieval city center and the walls of an old castle and buildings that date back several hundred years, really, really beautiful. And then bang in the middle of the old city, the local council or government have erected a really tasteless office block for the administration that is all made of glass and completely out of step with the rest of the buildings around it. So we could describe that very definitely as tasteless. No taste by the architects, no taste by the government in permitting such a building to be built. They could have built it outside the old city walls where it would have been in much better keeping with everything else around it, but instead they wanted to build it inside the city walls. So it's tasteless. A building that's very lavish, you know, lots and lots of floors, lots of elaborate balconies, lots of unusual architecture. But when you look at it in comparison to the other buildings around it, it's completely over the top, meaning it's really out of proportion. They spent more money on it than they should. And you really have to wonder what were they trying to achieve. So they could have done much better and spent less money. But of course, when the budget was being spent by the government, nobody was checking it, nobody held responsible. So the budget has gone a little bit out of control and the building itself now is completely OTT, over the top, not something that was absolutely necessary. Number seven, something out of place. Well, we've mentioned a couple of buildings here that would be tasteless and they could look out of place. Now the building itself may be actually really, really nice. So when you look at this new design, maybe it's oval shaped or it's the shape like the back of a tortoise or round instead of square. So it's really, really quite eye-catching. But unfortunately, it's been built in the wrong place as far as you're concerned. And it looks out of place. Perhaps it would look better sitting along the riverbank or close to the mouth of the where the river meets the ocean, but not tucked in behind two high-rise block of apartments. Nobody can see it, so it's a little bit out of place. And really in the open, not attached to other buildings, it might look quite contemporary, very modern, very stylistic, but at the moment it looks a little bit out of place in the wrong location. A block of apartments in the centre of a town surrounded by office buildings and coffee shops might look a little bit out of place. Or perhaps they were trying to get a message to the city developers that we need to include more residential buildings inside city centers because there's too much office building. Perhaps that's the idea, but at the moment the building looks a little bit out of place in the wrong location. Now, if it's a really beautiful building and there's only one word to describe it, stunning. A stunning building. A building that combines the old architecture of the high roofs, the granite facade, the use of modern glass and design and all of that. So you could say, yeah, wow, it's an absolutely stunning building. Whoever is the architecture, they really need to be rewarded with some recognition because this is a really beautiful building, one of the finest buildings that we have seen erected in our city for many a year. Okay, so something stunning. It could be more modern hotel or the new administration offices or the new civic offices or the new design for the museum that had been closed down for many, many years. And they've redesigned the front, they've redesigned the entrance and even the entrance hall, all redesigned. So one word will describe it, stunning. I doubt there's anybody who could find something to complain about. Stunning. A building that is dated, well, unfortunately, as buildings go and as cities develop, some buildings become a little bit dated. Particularly if we go to cities that were destroyed during the Second World War, maybe they were rebuilt in the 50s and 60s, and a lot of that architecture wasn't so attractive. So a lot of those buildings that are still in city centers today have become very dated. So governments are going to replace them. They're going to perhaps not knock them down entirely, but perhaps they'll change the facade, they'll change the shape of the windows or some other part of it. Or indeed, in others, they'll have no choice but just to bring it down to the ground level and start again with something a little bit more modern. So unfortunately, this design has become a little bit dated. Perhaps for modern heating techniques, for the way in which we light buildings, the way in which we bring energy into the buildings, these old buildings are completely dated. Okay, so that we need to redesign the windows, we need to redesign the roof, perhaps for the solar panels or whatever it might be that we're going to do. But those buildings of the 50s, the 60s and the 70s, the best thing you can do for them is to knock them down and you can keep the photographs, but that's all you want to look at. You don't want to see those buildings anymore. And lots of cities are going through those sort of changes. My own city, lots of the old buildings of the 50s, 60s, 70s, they have disappeared and are now being replaced by other more modern buildings. Of course, the question is, how long will it before these particular replacements are also dated? All of these buildings are completely in glass and they look nice now, but who knows in 10, 15, 20 years time, they themselves, these replacements, might also become dated. Number 10, ultra-modern. Wow. It's not just modern, it's more than that. It's ultra-modern. So it's really looking at everything. Perhaps they're using thermal heat extractors to take heat from the ground. It's covered in panels to absorb the heat, to maintain the heat in the building at a certain level. The roof is shaped so that it can not only capture all of the sunlight, but it also can capture the rainwater and recycle that. So it is really, really ultra-modern. It's the building, the modern day building that will be everything about climate control, greener buildings. So all of these issues that are really top of the agenda for governments to look at. So here's a building that will reflect everything that people will want to look at in carbon emissions, whatever it is, this building will have it and it can only be described as ultra-modern. Okay, so there are 10 particular adjectives to describe buildings, advanced adjective to describe buildings. One final one I'll throw in there, eyesore. It's an eyesore. This is a way of describing a building that really is literally sore on the eyes. When you look at it, you go, oh my God, that is hideous. That's the worst building I've ever seen. And in some funny ways, buildings that are eyesores are actually an attraction for the public because people want to really come and see. Is it really as bad as everybody says it was? Yeah, so it's a complete and utter eyesore. What is that doing there? Who built that particular building? Okay, well, that's the end of this particular lesson where we look at adjectives to describe buildings. You can practice those. You won't remember them all, but try to remember some of them, put them into different categories, look at some buildings in your city and see to some of these words, are they good words to use to describe the particular buildings that you are looking at? And if you need any more help, then please contact me, www.englishlessonviaskype.com. Always happy to hear from you. Include your suggestions, whatever they might be from time to time. We do include the listeners and viewers' suggestions into our videos. That's how we improve the content for you and for me. Okay, this is Harry saying thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. As always, remember to join me for the next lesson.