Travel magazine's ten ugliest buildings in the world
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A slide show of the ten ugliest buildings in the world, according to the editors of Travel magazine, is here. Not sure these are in any particular order, but my choice for ugliest is the one I chose to place up above - Federation Square, in Melbourne, Australia. A reader might understandably wonder how I made that choice, or for that matter how the editors of Travel made their choices, given the abundance of modernist buildings to choose from. Indeed, what causes some modernist buildings to get placed on this list and others to be nominated for the Stirling Prize? In fact, the architect of one of these buildings had two buildings nominated for this year's Stirling, and one of them won. The difference between prizewinning modernism and the dreck of "worst ten" lists is impossible to discern. Keep in mind that a history of two or three thousand years of traditional architecture preceded the age of modernism. None of those millions of buildings made it onto the list of what the editors of Travel thought were the world's ten worst. And those that did make the list include buildings decades long in the tooth. Even when architectural journals select their lists of worst buildings, they rarely include any traditional ones. An exception was this year's Carbuncle Award, in Britain. One of the buildings was a new Poundbury fire station - but you know it was selected only because it was rumored to have been designed by Prince Charles himself. Yes, they can hate Charlie, but they can't find any buildings the prince would like that are worse than any of the ones they believe must be built in our modern era. Does that say more about them or their era? Do you really want to know? A local tidbit: One of the ten worst here is the Pompidou Center, in Paris. The editors note that the design (by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano) was the winner of an international design competition, and the editors wonder, if the winner was this ugly, what the second-place design looked like. In fact, the second-place winner was our own Friedrich St. Florian (working, I believe, with Norman Foster). St. Florian designed Providence Place and the World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. St. Florian's second-place finish in such a prestigious competition was surely a milestone in his career, yet so far as I am aware, no illustration of the design has appeared in any of the restrospective exhibits after his retirement from RISD a couple of years ago. Interesting. 
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The Pompidou Center really is hideous, but I don't think that the television tower in Prague belongs on this list. I've been there; it's bizarre, but it's not really close to the beautiful parts of the city. There are plenty of Soviet-style soul-crushing monstrosities in the same general area that are far worse -- and people have to actually live in them. You can see the tower off in the distance from pretty much anywhere, but it looks perfectly fine since you don't get any detail unless you are up close. And, if you make your way to the top of the tower, you get some of the best views of the city; better even than from Prague Castle, since from there you can see the tower (heh). If your city has to have a communist legacy, you could do far worse.
Plus, the mutant babies give it character. I liked them.
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Marlo - I think the babies offended the editors because they put people in mind of the possibility of their falling off. I could be wrong. I should have added that the descriptions of the buildings are as funny as the buildings are ugly.
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