Rage That Knows No Bounds

Maybe it's gone on ever since it was built in 1968, but lately it seems that every 3 months or so, some publication or politician beats up on the Boston City Hall building. As I've written before, Mayor Menino seems hell-bent on demolishing the thing, and relocating the city's civic administration to South Boston, namely the Fan Pier, in an effort to spruce up the stalled-out development going on there.

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But it wasn't Menino this time; the most recent insult to the building is this: VirtualTourist.com ranked the building #1 on its "World's Top 10 Ugliest Buildings." What's interesting as well, is that this list apparently has a lot of pull, as it got picked up by Reuters and Boston.com. The particular [and brief] criticism levelled at the building this time highlights its "dreary facade and incongruity with the rest of the city's more genteel architecture." It's not all bad news though, apparently it was "hip for it's [sic] time."
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Is this what cities are meant to be, unbroken seas of incongruous genteel buildings? Sure, the building is the rough in a mound of diamonds, but it provides a confrontation and counterpoint to its stuffy, reserved context, in a way that makes cities dynamic and exciting and worth living in. It is an effective piece of architecture. I would have expected a more thoughtful and insightful argument for the #1 building on such a list -- this is no deep condemnation, it's just another piling on of the same tired critiques. Maybe my real frustration is that such a list has been so well publicized.
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However, as I made my way down the list to the runners-up and was impressed with some of these obscure picks, which I suppose is a credit to VirtualTourist.com, despite the fact that with the exception of Boston City Hall, all the buildings are in Europe, and mostly hideous. But it seems so geographically restricted: was the dismal Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea too politically controversial to add to the list?
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Because that thing sucks:

[via eikongraphia.com]

The only other enraging part of the list was #8: The Scottish Parliament Building, by Enric Miralles, a Spanish Architect who died in 2000, whilst in the prime of his career. I was able to visit the building in April of 2004, which was just before its completion in September of that year. It's a fascinating building that responds to its historical, political and geophysical contexts in a way that helps explain to me why architecture is a useful, worthwhile undertaking. It could be that I'm biased because I've been to see it, but it's an amazing building, albeit a little goofy. That being said, all we were able to get into at the time was the exhibit explaining the building, and I missed the impressive space of the debating chambers and such:

[images via wikipedia]

Sadly, I don't even have my own photos of the exterior. My brother Bill and I seemed to have misplaced a sizable chunk of our Edinburgh photos, which included some tripped-out photos from the strange and wonderful Camera Obscura...All the same, here's one of my favorite photos from the building nearby the Parliament building, which I think is the white tensile structure you can see in the last photo above.

[I think Andrew took this one. The building won this battle handily, by the way]