A £375m urban regeneration scheme among contenders for prize no architect wants to win

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A low-energy home that is said to look more like an electricity substation will compete with a £375m urban regeneration scheme and a “grotesque” city centre hotel extension for the annual prize no architect wants to win.

The Carbuncle Cup is given by the magazine Building Design to one of a shortlist of buildings its readers select as their least favourite of the last 12 months.

The magazine’s editor, Thomas Lane, said it was meant as a light-hearted exercise but one that also had a serious intent, to draw attention to examples of bad architecture blighting the UK’s towns and cities.

Six candidates have been shortlisted, including Lewisham Gateway by PRP Architects, a £375m urban regeneration scheme in south-east London. “It seems to me that ... they haven’t really regenerated anything at all,” Lane said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beckley Point 2 in Plymouth: the student accommodation is ‘disturbingly similar’ to the Las Vegas hotel New York New York. Photograph: Building Design

It includes the redesign of one of London’s “most notoriously inhospitable” traffic gyratory system, replacing it with a scheme that is worse, said Lane. For cyclists, it is “absolutely terrifying” and “if you are in a car you haven’t got a clue where you are going. All around it are new towers. It could have been so much better”.

Lane said substandard student accommodation has repeatedly made it into the Carbuncle Cup shortlist and 2018 was no exception.

Beckley Point in Plymouth is a 23-storey student housing block which, at 78-metres high, is now the tallest building in the south-west. The magazine characterises it as “Vegas heads to Plymouth by way of New York” in that it is “disturbingly similar” to the Las Vegas hotel New York New York, a fun-size caricature of New York skyscrapers stacked side by side.

“The difference is Beckley Point is no joke,” Lane said.

The building is bad enough, the magazine argues, but worst of all is the wider impact on Plymouth’s townscape. It is located on one of the highest points in the city centre and “ensures that the soulless incoherence that often characterises much of central Plymouth’s postwar reconstruction has been recycled for another generation”.

The smallest building on the shortlist is a type that often appears on best architecture prizes. The house at 20 Ambleside Avenue in Streatham, south London, meets demanding Passivhaus standards for low-energy designs but looks like an electricity substation.

The use of a single shade of red stock brick with matching pointing, orange guttering, tiles, shutters and gates gives the house “the appearance of a red-faced child who has said something gauche in a room full of grownups”.

Lane said the prize was not all about bad architecture. It shone light on serious planning failures, too.

A case in point is the “grotesque” rooftop extension to the Shankly Hotel in Liverpool voted through by the city council’s planning committee. After the architect was sidelined the hotel developers put in a new submission that the magazine argues is a “blight on the Liverpool skyline”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The house at 20 Ambleside Avenue in Streatham, south London, resembles an electricity substation. Photograph: Building Design

The other shortlisted candidates are Redrock Stockport, a £45m leisure centre that includes a 10-screen cinema and is a throwback to “the ugly, garish out-of-town container sheds that once encircled British towns and cities”, and Haydn Tower in Vauxhall, south London.

The cup’s name is a nod to a speech Prince Charles gave in 1984 when he called the proposed National Gallery extension “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”.

Previous winners have included the Drake Circus shopping centre in Plymouth, Liverpool Ferry terminal, MediaCity in Salford, and the Cutty Sark renovation in London.

Carbuncle Cup contenders for the prize architects want to avoid – in pictures Read more

Readers of the magazine have nominated the buildings they hate most. This year’s winner will be announced on 5 September, chosen by a panel that includes the writer and former Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey, the commissioner for Historic England, Rosemarie McQueen, and Building Design’s architecture correspondent, Ike Ijeh.

Above all Lane said he hoped the prize, which began in 2006, would stimulate debate. He also stressed that the magazine had contests that celebrated great architecture as well.

He admitted that architects themselves are not big fans of the Carbuncle Cup. “To be honest, there isn’t actually any kind of trophy or a ceremony. I don’t think anybody would turn up,” he said.