"drab building" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It means a plain, dull, and uninteresting building. Example: The city was filled with drab buildings, but one stood out amongst the rest with its colorful murals and unique architecture.
El Saadawi lives on the twenty-seventh floor of a drab building in Shubra, a few miles north of Tahrir Square.
In State Security's Branch 40, a drab building near a red-roofed Italian hospital, Marwa watched her husband stripped to his underwear and pushed into a battered chair.
When Ms. Vance and her husband bought their apartment 12 years ago, that room faced the Hunter College School of Social Work, a drab building on 79th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues.
I went to visit him in his office, in downtown Harbin, on the fourth floor of a drab building with heavy front doors and a security guard in the lobby.
Jose Espinosa and Otis Blunt hail from different towns and very likely were strangers until they wound up in the same jail, a drab building of sealed windows rising 14 stories behind the courthouse in downtown Elizabeth, N.J.
In a drab building in central Scotland, one afternoon in the armpit of winter, an actor who looks a lot like nice-guy James McAvoy is persuading a room full of blokes to – I'm paraphrasing here – Xerox their cocks.
Describes the drab buildings, uncared for lawns, poorly dressed people, the shoddy goods in the shops.
Having given the law school more of a public face, Mr. Young set his sights on improving its drab buildings.
The others, in the more Republican suburbs, require a drive of 15 minutes or longer to drab buildings in strip malls and office parks.
Most disturbing of all, though, is that the very practice of detention renders the men, women and children in the facilities as faceless and nameless as the drab buildings in which they are held.
The hotel site, which encompasses seven parcels that wrap around the corner, now holds a series of low-slung drab buildings, with street-level tenants that include a shoe store, a French restaurant and a bank.
