Seared into architectural folk memory is the time in 1984 when Prince Charles went off piste at a dinner to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects and laid into what he saw as the “ugliness” of modern architecture. It became known as the Carbuncle Speech, predicated on his description of the winning proposal for the National Gallery extension as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. For its time, it was an unprecedented broadside and establishment sphincters duly clenched. The National Gallery hastily backtracked and ended up commissioning a lukewarm piece of postmodernism by the American partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, while the architects of the carbuncle, Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, were stigmatised by royal disapproval and their practice suffered.
The carbuncle debacle marked a turning point in the relationship between the profession and the public. Seen, somewhat incredibly, as speaking for “ordinary people”, who were fed up with architects and their highfalutin ways, Prince Charles and his views were given further exposure through the fawning conduits of television programmes, books and his own magazine. A school of architecture was also established to disseminate the prince’s principles, and these ultimately coalesced in the form of Poundbury, the Dorset toytown that attempts to elide the modern world through its embrace of glutinous historical pastiche. Today, permanently cemented in the public mind with ugly architecture, the prince’s pustular epithet lives on, appropriated by the Carbuncle Cup, an annual jokey award for Britain’s worst building staged by the trade publication Building Design.
After a week that saw the abrupt culling of the Tulip by London mayor Sadiq Kahn, the debate about what is judged an ugly building has assumed a fresh piquancy. The mayor’s office has the last word on high-profile London developments, so despite the 305m (1,000ft) Tulip gaining planning permission in April, it has now been rejected on the grounds of its limited public amenity and unedifying design. For now, the City has been spared Foster + Partners’ floral folie de grandeur, another dire, priapic extrusion of capital that threatened to have “the appearance of a surveillance tower” on the London skyline.
Views on the ugliness, or otherwise, of architecture are never hard to solicit. “What an ugly building” has become a familiar knee-jerk response, wearyingly emblematic of the apparent chasm between public and professional points of view. The U-word surfaced yet again with the recent publication of an interim report from the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, the national taste watchdog initially headed by Roger Scruton, tasked with improving the design of housing and neighbourhoods. It urged local councils to have the confidence to “say no to ugliness”.
Compared with vast acreages of publications on theories of beauty, ugliness has been given relatively short shrift as a subject of intellectual inquiry. To its limited canon can now be added Ugliness and Judgment, a new book by architectural historian Timothy Hyde, which strikes out beyond the shallow babble of style wars into deeper and more intriguing terrain, to examine the consequences of judgments of ugliness in architecture. Episodically structured as a series of discrete narratives that crystallise particular critical exchanges and moments in history, it begins in 18th-century Bath, where, as Hyde writes, “the role and purpose of the aesthetic register of architecture came decisively into view”, with the concept of ugliness emerging as an instrument of political and social transformation. Charles’s carbuncle even makes an early appearance in the Ugly Face Clubs of the era, whose members had to demonstrate qualifying physiognomy. A “large Carbuncle Potatoe Nose” ensured acceptance.
Over time, arguments and judgments about what constitutes ugliness in architecture – whether it be incompleteness, incongruity or incorrectness – have leached out beyond the profession. Staged in courtrooms, parliamentary committees and public inquiries, strident debates about ugly buildings have influenced the development of technology, the letter of the law, church teaching, the context of criticism, the role of the state and even monarchical privilege. Charles’s now numerous extraconstitutional interventions form the basis of the concluding chapter, set against the more orthodox workings of the public inquiry in determining the fate of controversial civic projects, emphasising how contemporary claims about ugliness are, for better or worse, helping to refashion the state’s participation in cultural production.
Materiality of buildings is also a key theme. During the construction of the Houses of Parliament, the quest to find a type of stone that would not rot or stain – and thus become ugly – in London’s increasingly polluted atmosphere prompted wider epiphanies about the industrial metropolis. Aesthetic and legislative strategies to combat its capacity for civic uglification included the development of terracotta, which, unlike stone, proved admirably resistant to the corrosive effects of the “London particular”, and the evolution of nuisance laws to address the newly recognised inseparability of individual buildings in a city shaped by its atmosphere.
A deliciously gossipy chapter on ugliness and the development of libel law recounts the travails of John Soane, who repeatedly and fruitlessly sued critics of his buildings. The Modern Goth, a satirical poem published in the Observer in October 1796 concluded “In silence build from models of Your own / And never imitate the work of Sxxne”. When its author was revealed to be surveyor Philip Norris, Soane took up legal cudgels, but claims of libel were dismissed by the jury after half an hour’s deliberation. In Norris’s defence, his lawyers argued that since the target of his poetic opprobrium, Soane’s design for the Bank of England, was “a public work in which the national taste was to some degree involved, criticism ought to be entirely free upon it”.
As Hyde eloquently demonstrates in a compelling trajectory that arcs from Stonehenge to modern London, ugliness is more than a physical trait or quality assigned to an object. It has acted as a site and catalyst for debate on broader social circumstances of change and conflict, codifying, clarifying and improving in its wake. Beyond the casually slung insult, ugliness has a surprisingly rich inner life, and in shaping architecture’s wider relationship with society, it has proved to be an exquisitely necessary evil.
• Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye by Timothy Hyde is published by Princeton Press, £27. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
