10 loathed architectures, that architects love

The name (“Ugly House”) says it all. I”t’s like seeing in a dream one of those strange Cubist paintings where, after a while, not even the artist understands anything, and where the ability to draw a direct line and a harmonious sign is lacking, so metaphysics makes up for it”: this was the criticism with which the newspaper Il Secolo greeted a building that was “scandalous” for its time. Such criticism expresses a dislike of the metaphysical school and of the Novecento style that was gaining ground in Italy, and of which Giovanni Muzio’s first project – a collage of different materials, trompe l'oeil and classical elements concealing a reinforced concrete structure – stood as a manifesto.

Built right at the heart of a booming Milan, close to the Duomo, this tower of offices and apartments would be an instant scandal for public opinion – it is tall and isolated from the surrounding skyline, its shape with its protruding head is unprecedented – and for architectural debate. It was one of the works that best explained Italy’s “retreat from modern architecture”, as Reyner Banham would write, i.e. Neo-Liberty, an architecture attentive to the presence of the past, to detail and the value of decoration, expressed here among medieval echoes, buttresses, cornices and marble grit.

“Pompidoleum” or “usine à gaz” (gasworks), as Jean Clair, the General Conservator of French Heritage, called it at the time of its construction, or more directly “monstrous object”, in the words of the sociologist Jean Baudrillard, there is no building that has provoked more furious controversy, as opposed to unprecedented enthusiasm, than the Centre Pompidou. An exhibitionist machine in its mechanics, with structures and installations brought to the outside, in contrast to medieval and 17th-century Paris, it is a cultural center that wants to bring culture into the world of consumption, it is the “Beaubourg effect” that Baudrillard himself invented: “... culture was somehow overexposed and plundered there, abandoned to a delirious overconsumption... a cultural black hole. And the agents of its disappearance were the very masses who were to become the consumers of culture”. Of course, it is also the mother architecture of global High-Tech.

At just over 50 years old, the passage of time has not made this 210-metre tower any more bearable for the Parisian population. People still say that the best view in the city is from its windows – because that’s the only way not to see it – and yet presidents like Mitterrand, Chirac and Macron have set up their campaign headquarters there. That's because the building, designed by Jean Saubot, Eugène Beaudouin, Urbain Cassan and Louis de Hoÿm de Marien, was born to embody the aspirations of a new generation of post-war citizens, creating a modern multi-functional plateau with a new station and new services in the heart of a then run-down district.

The history of this building is linked to the ambivalent relationship between public opinion and Brutalism, an architectural movement of which Paul Rudolph is one of the most important names. Vilified by its own owners and slated for demolition due to the damage and leaks caused by storms and hurricanes, the building immediately attracted a large mobilisation in favour of its preservation. Between 2015 and 2017 it was partially demolished, rebuilt and extended.

Perhaps the most famous case of polarising Brutalism, Boston City Hall managed to win a Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects at its inauguration and praise from the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, but also countless ridicule (“upside-down wedding cake”), even shock at the sight of its drawings (“What the hell is that?”) from the mayor who decided to build it anyway.  The diatribe came to an end in January 2025, when the architecture was declared a Boston landmark.

More than a single building, the Unité d'Habitation is a concept, the Cité Radieuse, Le Corbusier's programmatic vision for a post-war popular living space (the first was in Marseilles, others were in Rézé, Briey, Firminy and Berlin), a new chapter after those that had made the Swiss architect a reference point for Modernism. It combines all the functions of a city in one building and places them on the outskirts of the city itself, which is perhaps why it was initially greeted with mistrust by those it was intended for. Its generosity in terms of services and communal areas – the double-height corridor, the famous terrace – would not go unnoticed: the exposed concrete structures would make the Unité a mother of Brutalism, and the interiors designed by Charlotte Perriand would make it an icon of the design world, with its original inhabitants joined by the intellectual bourgeoisie and Chanel choosing it as the location for its fashion shows.

Another Brutalist icon at the centre of a fierce debate was this social housing complex, where the two Team X architects had experimented with their “street in the sky” concept, an elevated circulation system on which apartments and duplexes were placed to create an urban character within the building. A sense of community had been created, but multiple blind spots and deteriorating materials soon got the better of it, leading to a regeneration plan approved in 2012, along with a demolition plan completed in 2025. However, the mobilization of the architectural community was enormous: parts of the building are preserved in the Victoria&Albert Museum and were exhibited at the 2018 Venice Biennale.

Designed in the 1970s to apply the solutions of the megastructural utopia to the south-west of Rome, the one-kilometre-long linear social housing complex ran into difficulties even before it was completed, with squatting and a lack of services, and became a symbol of the malaise of the Italian suburbs. “It is triumphantly realised as the threshold or limit of the Roman suburbs, without any certainty of being able to really condition its developments”, wrote the historian Manfredo Tafuri on Domus in 1980; several calls for its demolition followed, then a double regeneration project from 2015 to the present day.

Called “washing machines”, but also referred to as an “eco-monster”, with the typical ease with which labels are applied with little resolution, the social housing complex designed by Rizzo on a hill overlooking Genoa was born in the early 1980s on the wave of Law 167, which aimed to provide housing for the working masses in industrial cities. The disapproval of the citizens – along with the hypothesis of demolition – was due to usual reasons of isolation and lack of services, but also to the impossibility of integrating it into its context, since it is located on a slope above the motorway, with the concrete modules of its megastructural matrix in full view. In fact, it is precisely this location that gives the residential units a completely new quality of light, landscape and panorama.

Both this cubic, over-decorated municipal office building and its designer are icons of postmodernism. The first of the two, with its blue statue of the goddess Portlandia, soon became a symbol of the city, but it was also the subject of fierce criticism, not least because of the building’s budgetary problems and the darkness that the small windows imposed on the interior. Threats of demolition were made in 2014, and Graves himself came out in defense of the building.

The most famous example of how postmodernism can bring traditionalists and modernists together in attacking it, the National Gallery’s extension, built to house its Renaissance collections has had a controversial life since before it was even born. For what was a parking space in a bombed-out hole throughout the post-war period, an initial high-tech project in 1984 was abandoned after attacks from none other than the then Prince Charles, and a second competition was won by Venturi and Scott Brown with a pastiche of historical and contextual references, leaps in scale and borderline pop inserts that bore a collective stigma from minute one as a work “out of place” in the context it was meant to comment on.

A stop on the standard tour of anyone – in possession of an architecture degree or similar – finding themselves in Berlin for the first time, this large complex, designed in 1981 and completed six years later, was intended to give architecture a very important role – as Rossi also told Domus – in restoring the value of urban continuity to the Friedrichsstadt area of Berlin, which had been ravaged by war, and by non-reconstruction during the decades of the Wall. An architecture as dense with theory as the whole of Rossi’s production, especially in its first 20 years, which, just as it positions itself on the street with its huge white corner column, also positions itself in a debate –on the critique of modern – that is perhaps more felt by architects than by those outside the discipline, who are taken by them to visit a linear brick block, still quite isolated in the midst of emptiness, where reconstruction never seems to have arrived.