When it comes to architecture, there’s no point carping about carbuncles

The thing about the Carbuncle Cup is that it’s always too late. It’s a posthumous prize. Ridiculing hideous buildings is like Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills or kicking a concrete barrier; pointless, embarrassing and probably painful. We are condemned to live with these monsters and humiliating them is hardly helpful.

One of the shortlisted buildings on this year’s (newly revived) Carbuncle Cup is a universally derided building, a new W hotel, which has been dubbed “the Jobby” — Scots for turd — and which looks, on Edinburgh’s skyline, remarkably like a poo emoji. It is a self-signing shit building. That no one in the process, not the architects, the client or the planners saw the clarity of the metaphor and the eye-popping hideousness of the actuality seems incredible.

But there it stands and no number of sarcastic awards will get it demolished. So really, what’s the point? It’s not the Razzies where you can just decide not to go see a terrible movie. Edinburgh is very much stuck with the turd.

The cup winner, announced on Tuesday, is another grim landmark: the Lime Street redevelopment in Liverpool. A varied and interesting terrace of buildings, including a much-loved 1912 Futurist cinema, was demolished. The blank walls of the new buildings now feature rubbish renderings of the buildings that had been there. And were much better.

In recent years a whole host of voices have piped up calling for “beauty” in architecture. From Michael Gove to Angela Rayner, politicians have latched on to what seems an easy win. After all, who doesn’t like beautiful buildings?

In 1997, Tony Blair arrived on London’s Aylesbury Estate in Southwark to make his first speech as prime minister, deliberately setting himself against a background of “ugly” architecture. But to a younger generation desperate for their own place, desperate for a London home, that estate with its masses of subsidised housing, generous spaces and cheap rents might look a little like paradise.

Since then, Brutalism and municipal Modernism have become fashionable and desirable. Walking tours lead groups of tourists around estates and arts centres, concrete car parks and shopping centres. Skateboarders colonise the last remnants of public space beneath elevated walkways; social media influencers obsessively document the shadows and textures of what were once dubbed “concrete monstrosities”. The Barbican, reviled for years, is now the hippest place to live in the City.

Tastes change. Who is really to say what is beautiful? When asked, what people find beautiful is, apparently, “historic” architecture. Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s views have concretised a notion of “building beauty”, for which there is now a postgrad programme and an award (better than carbuncles but, again, whose beauty?). At the same time rightwing social media accounts depict idealised images of old European cities in a kind of aesthetic dog-whistle about an old, white Europe.

Recently the architect Thomas Heatherwick’s campaign group Humanise collaborated on a series of accessories — mugs, tea towels, fridge magnets — featuring AI-generated pictures of famous buildings rendered as Brutalist or late Modernist. A concrete-framed Palace of Westminster, a minimalist Buckingham Palace (this one, weirdly, far better than the real thing), a Brutalist Edinburgh Castle (far better, in fact, than the Jobby). But so what? Unless we live in Bath or Venice, our buildings will be a churning mix of eras and qualities and they will shift in and out of favour and fashion.

Most of what is built is execrable. It is also true, however, that most of what is built has never been anywhere near an architect’s office

None of this is to suggest that we are living in a golden age of architecture. Most of what is built is execrable. It is also true, however, that most of what is built has never been anywhere near an architect’s office. Of all the housing in the UK, for instance (and this is where most of the worst architecture is), only about 6 per cent is designed by architects.

It is the model that is flawed. The UK’s local authorities have been stripped of cash since the disastrous drive for austerity and their planning departments have been decimated. Planning is not proactive but purely reactive. It is left to developers to plan huge chunks of the city and virtually all the country’s national housing.

The UK has some of the most widely admired, influential and successful architectural practices in the world but its actual architecture is largely mediocre and often dire. That is what makes even a tongue-in-cheek humorous competition like this problematic. Sure it’s a cheap laugh and it highlights some dreadful decisions. But it is only the tip of an iceberg of frozen sewage.

I don’t much like singling out the worst. I’m not even that keen on awards for the best. It would be good, instead, to think that we were aiming for a decent average. But that, of course, doesn’t generate publicity, headlines or awards. Perhaps the question then is, has the Carbuncle Cup, now regenerated by the Fence Magazine from its initiators Building Design, made architecture any better since its genesis in 2006?

The roll call of architectural disasters is long and depressing with occasional humour at the depths of incompetence. But the question is, has British architecture improved significantly? And the answer is, probably not.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

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