Well it couldnt be clearer than that from BD me thinks, they dont like it.
The full citation:
“Next to our three gently ageing Edwardian Beauties, The Three Graces, The Port of Liverpool Building, The Cunard Building and the Liver Building, they stick a trashy tart.
“A building that jerks against the restrained classiscism that made Liverpool famous, that escaped the blitz, that managed to survive against all odds……….only now to look alien in their own settings.
“The challenge was to use classical materials in a modern manner but here they have failed.
“Travertine was the first choice abandoned for the cheaper Jura after planning approval.
“Below it is the now destroyed Manchester Dock that was intact and predated the Albert Dock by 60 years.
“Is it only Liverpool that thinks it can get away with destroying its history in a World Heritage Site. It is being bravefaced but it really is like giving a pretty girl a black eye, knocking all her teeth out and saying ’smile you look lovely’.” http://www.bdonline.co.uk/buildings/carbuncle-cup/carbuncle-cup-citation-museum-of-liverpool-by-3xn/aew/5022074.article
Clunky slabs and botched “landmarks” battle it out to win the coveted title of worst building of the year.
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/comment/bloated-icons-and-dreary-sheds-go-head-to-head-in-the-race-for-the-carbuncle-cup/5022082.article
This year’s carbuncle nominees fall into two categories: the failed iconic, and the grimly mundane.
At one end of the spectrum we have Atkins and Grimshaw’s Newport Station and Bond Bryan’s Phoenix High School, both bleak attempts at novelty. One is a globular silver swoosh realised with the prosaic flair of design and build; the other has been likened to a pile of liquorice allsorts – because it is lurid and wonky. It is telling that Network Rail’s own promotional posters only show the station in a night-time view from the air, while the pupils of Phoenix now all want to become architects – surely so others may not have to suffer their fate.
Representing the bloated apogee in this pursuit of the iconic is the £72 million Museum of Liverpool, the bastard child of 3XN, AEW and several lawsuits. It is the ultimate flashy esquisse executed with the leaden hand of the local authority, a crumpled quilt of stone stretched back and forth until it sufficiently destroys the city’s majestic waterfront.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have three projects completely devoid of ambition, standing for the worst of the lumpen planner-friendly filler that blights our cities.
In desperately trying to avoid any suggestion of wasting licence-payers’ money, “MediaCityUK” has ended up as a field of mediocrity. An agglomeration of bulky slabs, dressed in cheap panelised systems, it is reminiscent of the kind of flimsy rubbish that airport terminals tend to accrue.
One Hyde Park is precisely the opposite, straining to appear as expensive and refined as possible, yet ending up looking like the product of a volume house-builder. It will not be the last silo of sheiks to sprout up in Knightsbridge, but it will be hard to beat its clunky detailing and mean-minded attitude to the street. Just where did that £1 billion go?
Finally, Brighton’s Ebenezer Chapel housing development by Molyneux Architects represents the depressing reality of most housing today – blunt expanses of render punctured by tiny windows. As our reader’s citation suggests, “It is these mediocre buildings that damage our cities more than bolder failures.”
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Rome MAXXI
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