Tour Montparnasse, Paris

When it opened in 1973, towering over the 14th and 15th arrondissements in the south of the capital, almost no one had a good word to say about the first – and only – skyscraper to rise in central Paris. Well, they hated the Eiffel Tower and the Pompidou too, at first, but the Tour Montparnasse has only got worse with age. From a distance it glowers obnoxiously over Paris’s sea of Haussmannian gray, while at street level, tethered to a neighborhood-blighting shopping center, it’s even worse. Its most deleterious effect was to kill off the possibility of any tall buildings in Paris for a generation: the capital essentially banned skyscrapers until last decade, though a new project by Jean Nouvel in the southeast is now underway.