From the article:
"It’s legendary for being the most hated building in Paris. I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth. Parisians reacted aesthetically, as they are wont to do, but they failed to consider the consequences of what it means to be a vital, living city versus a museum city. People sentimentalize their notions of the city, but with the carbon footprint, the waste of resources, our shrinking capacity, we have no choice but to build good high-rise buildings that are affordable. It’s not by coincidence that people are going to London now not just for work but for the available space. No young company can afford Paris. Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be."<p>I can't help but mentally find & replace Paris -> San Francisco.
We finally managed to get rid of this monstrosity last year in Chicago: <a href="http://www.landmarks.org/images/ten_most_2011_press/Prentice%20Women's%20Hospital.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.landmarks.org/images/ten_most_2011_press/Prentice...</a>.<p>Also relevant: <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ugly-government-buildings-in-washington#.xbYDyMOxBW" rel="nofollow">http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ug...</a> ("There are many gorgeous buildings in D.C. Unfortunately for us, in the ’60s and ’70s, the federal government only hired architects with early onset glaucoma.")
I know people hate Centre Pompidou but I do not share that hate. As a child my parents took me there many times and for years I would have wild, beautiful architectural dreams about it. It's what made me realize that architecture is not just a historical thing but something that people who are living in the present can do as well, and that it is something that can be shocking and beautiful at the same time.
I remember when Melbourne wanted to build a new 'city square' sort of area, which required knocking down an existing building. The building was the Gas & Fuel Corporation Towers, which was a pretty boring orange-brick high-rise[1]. A Melburnian all my life, I'd never heard anyone posit an opinion on the building, good or bad, in person or in media. It was boring. It wasn't pretty, but it was just there.<p>But then they wanted to knock it down, and out came a media campaign where all the newspapers were talking about how ugly it was and what a blight, and suddenly people were ferociously hateful towards it. "Don't you <i>just hate</i> that building?" Well, no. And neither did you until you read about it in the paper. The weird thing was that the campaign was unnecessary (IMO) because people didn't care one way or another. It's not like people treasured the aesthetics or it had some historical tie...<p>They replaced it with a building that looks like a pile of glass at the recyclers [2]. Admittedly it's not boring, but neither is it attractive.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel-corporation-towers.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel-cor...</a>
[2]<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federation_Square_%28SBS_Building%29.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federatio...</a>
[2a]<a href="http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px-Federation-Square-Melbourne.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px-Federat...</a>
Having grown up just down the road from the second building on this list and having tried to navigate its dilapidated, maze-like corridors and awkwardly arranged "open" spaces, I can testify to its horrendous design. It routinely shows up on these types of "most hated" lists both nationally and globally for good reason.<p>I wish I could understand the mindset of the original architect or, better yet, the local bureaucrats back in the day who thought it was a great idea to build something so large seemingly modeled on a random stack of toddler's play toys.<p>Now it just serves to suck the county coffers dry due to ludicrously exorbitant maintenance costs (I mean, come on, "80 roofs?"). A soon-to-be-demolished, barely-used monument to bad government decisions and a complete lack of foresight of the late 1960's and early 1970's.
Nobody defending the brutalist city hall building in Boston, I see...<p>> I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and make it feel more part of everyday life — which they’ve tried to do with farmers’ markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn’t feel so hostile.<p>Seems eerily familiar to the sentiment surrounding the plaza by the city hall in Boston.
I was very surprised Albany's plaza was on the list. Having grown up there I have many memories of staring in awe at its monolithic towers as they soar up from the plaza. I always really liked it and the plaza's great. They put shows on there and small festivals I believe.
The Zaha Hadid, Ada Tolla, and Norman Foster seem to have the connecting thread of visibly stained concrete, making them look dirty on top of any other aesthetic flaws.
What legacy will we pass on, what heritage will we build if all we do is imitating the past?
Why don't we go and burn old books in our libraries and paintings in our museums because we think they're 'ugly'? Heritage is more that today's sense of prettiness.