In my opinion, the short distance to the object in the first picture increases the drama and emphasizes the size of the building.There are cases where you just have to live with distortion because there is no other way to get a certain shot.
This building is the "Umlauftank 2" in Berlin by the architect Ludwig Leo. It is a research building that was built between 1969 and 1975. The large tube is coated in pink polyurethan foam, inside they accelerate water to 10m/s that goes round in circles through the tube. The blue box is 5 floors high and at it's bottom there is a basin where you can put in ship models in the accelerated water to test their shapes for flow resistance. I took photos after the renovation. The machinery is still functional. Look at the scale of the lorry in front of it to see how large this architecture is. The tube has an overall length of 120m and contains 3.300t of water.
If you look at the first shot – yes of course, the tube segments are heavily distorted, they have a circular section in reality. And the shot was very wide with a lot of shift. To reduce distortion I got as far back as possible, but behind my position there were dense trees. And I tried to get a bit higher, so I stood on a houseboat that lies in the canal next to the building. And I used a large tripod.
A drone might have helped to get even higher. But I had the intention not to get away too far from a pedestrians perspective.
So I live with the distortion. Because this shot is basically the one I wanted.
On the second image you can see how this building is situated at the edge of "Tiergarten", the large central park in Berlin. I took it from the roof of a university building nearby. A loooong focal length with no distortion ;-)
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I find this "effect" very useful here. Wide-angle distortion can also be used positively.
I am pleased to see that in Berlin, too, there is a white delivery van in almost every architectural photograph.