The judging panel for Building Design, the magazine that created the award as a lighthearted counterpart to the prestigious Stirling Prize, said the shed-like building “ridiculed the town center it had intended to rescue,” describing it as a “sad metaphor” for Britain’s declining main streets.

The magazine’s readers were even more blunt in their assessments. One called the Redrock an “absolute monstrosity.”

“I’ve seen better-looking prisons,” another commented. “This is why the Carbuncle Cup was invented. Wrong in everything that is important and to a degree that makes one wonder what were the designers and planners who worked on this abomination thinking.”

The judges, who included Building Design’s architecture critic, Ike Ijeh, said they objected to the building’s “awkward form,” “disjointed massing” and “superficial decoration.”

“Urban regeneration can be a good thing,” they said in a statement. “But when it becomes an excuse to foist bad architecture onto struggling communities in the cynical pursuit of an ‘anything is better than what was there before’ methodology, it simply recycles the resentment regeneration was supposed to redress.”