04 September 2009

Carbuncle Cup ~ For Uglitechture & Architorture!

Hilarious to read in The Times the piece by Tom Dyckhoff noting that The Carbuncle Cup: The award for ugliest building goers to...
"When an architect has done something truly awful, they deserve to be kicked." Amanda Baillieu, the august editor of the architectural newspaper Building Design, is not known for mincing her words. Faced with a building as eyewateringly dreary as Liverpool’s Pier Head Ferry Terminal, though, words fail her: "It’s just dross. Look at it. It’s ... agh!" [...] One of this year’s judges, Sean Griffiths, from architects FAT, says Liverpool’s ferry terminal won not just for its derivative design, though this is bad enough: "Third-rate Zaha Hadid, a crude, jazzy-angled lump of crap, a terrible example of an architecturally illiterate client trying to be groovy and getting it so, so wrong, like a 50-year-old making a fashion faux pas in a disco." What makes it worse, he says, is where the thing is, slap-bang on Liverpool’s waterfront, a Unesco World Heritage Site, beside the city’s Three Graces. “It literally is a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an old friend," he says."
MIT, unfortunately, has its own disproportionate share of carbuncular crap, including the Student Center, MIT Sloan's Dewey Library building, and more recent artrocities including the Stata Center, Simmons Hall, the new Porter Building at MIT Sloan, and the new Media Lab Expansion.

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