For the last 10 years, the architecture paper Building Design has awarded their Carbuncle Cup to “the ugliest building completed in the United Kingdom” in the last 12 months. The latest winner, announced in September, is Lincoln Plaza, a cluster of high-rise towers in Canary Wharf, designed by BUJ Architects for Galliard Homes. It garnered an unusual amount of press attention for an architecture story, as the Carbuncle Cup always does; as many column inches, usually, as the “best building” award, the Stirling Prize.
Normally a faintly bathetic statement is issued by the client (never the shamefaced architect). This time, a Galliard spokesperson mumbled: “these awards are really subjective matters of taste,” and given that “the scheme sold out” it is evidently “liked by the purchasers.” Those buyers might have had an eye on the increase in reputation of architecture previously considered carbuncular. We’re now living through one of those revisionist moments that happens every 25 or so years. Georgian architecture was loathed by the Victorians who were loathed in turn by the Modernists (who loved the Georgians) who were hated by the post-modernists who are in turn hated by the modernist revivalists.