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This last week of the year when the architectural internet is celebrating the ten best buildings of 2025 as is its custom, I’d like to consider the worst buildings a particular architect has put their name to. It’s too late to be an office party game or a Christmas party game but you can limit suggestions to a particular country, or to this decade or this year, or architect, and decide beforehand if unbuilt projects are allowed. Let’s do architects and include unbuilt! I’ll go first.

These first two actually did come at us from 2025. Norman Foster seems to be always outdoing himself with his firm’s dystopian visions for a proposed 100,000-seater stadium for Manchester1. And then there’s his proposal for JP Morgan’s (new 10,000-seater) New York headquarters.2 It’s like one of those over-ambitious seventies movies where everything is bad – the plot, the premise, the casting, the editing, the acting, the hair, the dialogue, costumes, the lighting…3 What’s worse is when it’s not like that out of incompetence but because someone actually made decisions for it to be like that. With movies, the usual indicators are small children with angel wings and dimly-lit rooms with an improbably large number of candles. With architecture, or at least buildings, I’m now wary of tensile roofs with symbolic over-reach, and bronze towers with shoulder-padded massing wanting to be the Seagram Building, the (formerly known as) Hancock Center and The Great Pyramid of Giza all in one. We’re witnessing F+P’s Late Mannerist phase.

I’ve always thought that architectural aesthetics is contextual both in the sense of what we see and also in the sense of what we know, and so I’m inclined to first think that an ugly building is just a building in the wrong place, in much the same way as some people like to think that weeds are just plants in the wrong place. But rather than reject that and think that ugly buildings are just ugly buildings, I can’t help thinking what I’m picking up on is the built manifestation of unbridled greed and that, because of that, these building would be ugly anywhere. Right now, these are just proposals but they’re not going to be the buildings that people will remember Foster+Partners by. History is an ongoing project. These two projects seem like dinosaurs from another era – pre-2008. I’d be happy to see global economic armageddon kill off these two. Let’s see it as an opportunity.

Frank Lloyd Wright. He’s all but forgotten now except by architectural history teachers and their students who don’t understand what all the fuss was about. It’s all a long time ago now, FLW had too many attempts to remain relevant, and our attention is pretty much taken up by other things anyway. Here’s a link to a list of (not) all FLW projects, including those whose authorship is disputed, as well as some that were demolished without any photographs being taken. Demolition is also form of architectural criticism, but it’s amazing how many were destroyed by fire. This one was never built and doesn’t appear on the list, but I suspect the house FLW designed for playwright Arthur Miller and his wife (from 1956-1971) Marilyn Monroe was something of a shocker as “The couple had originally planned to replace the old farmhouse [at 232 Tophet Road in Roxbury, Connecticut] with a new home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but they decided the plan produced by the famous architect was too impractical and expensive.”4 Mr. and Mrs. Miller are understood to have said it was too ostentatious. Miller was later quoted as saying something along the lines of “not trusting architects who don’t put swimming pools in the ground.”

Wright’s 1946 Cottage Studio design for Anne Rand is also a shocker for being the work of an architect desperate to remain relevant by being the same and different at the same time. It rarely works but that doesn’t stop architects from trying.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. You never know these buildings exist until you look for them. My vote is for Mies’ 1964 Layfayette East Coopertive at 1300 E Lafayette St, Detroit, Michigan. Here you’ll see none of Mies’ over-hyped sense of proportion, detail and material selection. Without a site plan, it’s difficult to see if there was any justification for the Blvd. View apartments being displaced one structural bay from the River View apartments. Its ugliness lies in why we don’t know more about this building that’s famous in Detroit for the 1300 on the elevator machine room being visible for miles. It’s unlikely Mies suggested this, but it could be part of the reason why this building isn’t better known. Or it could be the fact it has openable windows, windows to the access corridor, and a safer placement of fire escape stairs. It’s obviously a practice cashflow building. Even 21st century offices have them and I think architectural education has done students a disservice by promoting a vision of architecture rather than the sometimes unpretty realities of running an office.

Kazuo Shinohara. For me it’s his 1964 Asakura House.5 Photographs exist, but none authorized by Shinohara until the building was finally acknowledged (along with one image) 32 years later. For me, the building never sat well, and nor did the secrecy.

Kengo Kuma.

Le Corbusier can illustrate so many things. So then, what’s his worst building or proposal, the one that was almost immediately buried and is never taught and that most architects don’t even know about? I’m going to propose His Mundaneum6 proposal for Geneva. It’s got the lot. It’s a knowledge centre with snaking spiralling circulation. If you turned it upside down you’d get a proto-Guggenheim. History is silent on why it wasn’t built. This was a competition proposal and it’s true LC was busy in 1929 with a speculative masterplan for Moscow, the ongoing Villa Savoye saga, half a dozen other houses, a lecture voyage to Argentina, visits to Moscow, sketching Josephine Baker, writing the first volume of his œuvre complète…7 Here’s a link to Karel Teige’s article ‘Mundaeum’. It’s special because this is real-time criticism of an LC proposal – something that’s unheard of only because we never get to hear about it. This paper8 informed me that criticism of this project at the time was more widespread than I thought. In addition to Karel Teige, El Lissitizky, Mart Stam, and Hannes Meyer are also on record of voicing criticisms that LC of course defended despite that north-west elevation speaking for itself.

“However, the whole conception, as we can read from the site plan, gives a puzzling, archaic impression.  The museum building in the shape of a pyramid has no functional justification and produces an effect of an old Egyptian, or rather old Mexican atmosphere.  The spiral organization of spaces, giving ever-increasing areas of space to more recent periods, is achieved at the cost of ending up with a dark interior hall (the Sacrarium makes a virtue of this necessity) and at the cost of extremely difficult access from the top, by means of long ramps, and inadequate elevators.” (Teige)

I’ve just finished reading Françoise Fromonot’s recent book The House of Dr. Koolhaus9 which is an analysis of Rem Koolhaas’s 1984 Villa dall’Ava. Having just read about its parallels and inversions and distortions of Villa Savoye, I’m now wondering if the knowledge centre with snaking spiralling circulation that is the Seattle Public Library isn’t another manifestation of RK’s love-hate relationship with LC, even though daddy issues are usually limited to actual sons and heirs, not imagined ones. Anyway, LC’s 1929 Mundaneum is my choice. From here, we could go with either Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry.

RK/OMA. There may have been misguided proposals along the way but, despite decades of trying, the 2017 Alserkal Avenue art shed doesn’t amount to even a toehold in the Dubai market for the built manifestation of capital10 11. In S,M,L,XL speak, it’d come after the early houses but well towards the front of a revised edition. You can see my disappointment in the following photographs (taken at roughly the same time of day, it looks like) but it’s not about size or my personal sense of underwhelm. I think it was the other three facades and their contrivedly non-planar sprayed concrete surfaces studded with coloured glassy somethings that made me realize my attention was worth more than this was offering. On that count, Milan’s Fondazione Prada is a close second but at least it was open when I went and the art inside more than made up for it12.

Zaha Hadid. I hate to repeat myself13. Again. Her? The? 2006 Antwerp Port House is a shocker that keeps on giving. It’s an extra five levels of wrong. In an attempt to analyze it to death, I can think of many things wrong with it and go some way to articulating why but, contrary to what the French say, to understand is not to forgive. I don’t think it’s the “form” [ugh!] I object to but the built manifestation of hubris.

Bjarke Ingels. For me, nothing beats King Toronto14for its desire to be the hottest new thing while being designed to offer Chinese buyers as little as possible for their yuan. Ensuring maximum number of units meant double-loaded corridors around a narrow light well. The diagonal grid stops the inner apartments looking directly into apartments on the other side. The ugliness here lies in the architects’ role in ruthless market exploitation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the easily-found image on the left isn’t the one the project silhouette was based on. Shabby.

Frank Gehry. This wasn’t as easy as I thought. I can’t decide between the 2010 Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health which gives brain health a bad name, the 2021 The Tower of LUMA in Arles, France or the vile 2018 Marquis de Riscal Winery in Rioja, Spain. As with the Hadid, the Foster and all of the above. I think I’m over-sensitive to architect hubris.

But how about now? Or the recent now? I used to dread every new Edouard François building and, to a lesser extent every Jurgen Mayer H. building but I think his 2001 Stadt.haus is actually quite nice and not as a guilty pleasure.15 I think its weirdness is well judged and not superficial. But I don’t want to ruin this post with likings. It’s a shame JMH concentrated on shapey and patterny weirdness and never pursued more of this kind of weirdness. Maybe next year. Let’s have a better one!

One last thing. Let me share a book I’ve been reading. It’s called Just Enough, by Azby Brown. Mine is the Tuttle edition but there are others out there. It’s about how Japanese people lived during the Edo Period (1603-1867) and tells us how water was conserved, forests were managed, rice was grown, farms were laid out, houses were designed and constructed, how rice and bamboo stalks were used to make things, iron was reshaped to make others, how society and labour were organized, the absence of waste, etc. Much of it was worked out in Neanderthal times. The good news is that zero waste, self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship are possible. The bad news is that it was 250 years ago and the market economy hadn’t yet arrived in Japan.
https://www.abebooks.com/9784805312544/Lessons-Living-Green-Traditional-Japan-4805312548/plp

• • • 

  1. https://www.dezeen.com/2025/03/11/manchester-united-stadium-foster-partners/ ↩︎
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/03/eco-obscenity-norman-foster-skyscraper-jp-morgan-new-york ↩︎
  3. the movie I was thinking of was Silent Running ↩︎
  4. https://historicbuildingsct.com/arthur-miller-marilyn-monroe-house-1783/ ↩︎
  5. The Asakura House ↩︎
  6. Architecture Misfit #9: Karel Teige ↩︎
  7. Architecture Myths #20: The Villa Savoye ↩︎
  8. https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/158312899.pdf ↩︎
  9. https://www.park-books.com/en/product/the-house-of-doctor-koolhaas/1615 ↩︎
  10. The History of Forgetting ↩︎
  11. https://www.cladglobal.com/architecture_design_news?codeid=330940 ↩︎
  12. Waste in Venice ↩︎
  13. New Ugly vs. New Cute ↩︎
  14. Moneymaking Machines #6: King Toronto ↩︎
  15. Guilty Pleasures ↩︎

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