From psychedelic chequerboards to sci-fi hulks, which of these magnificent monstrosities is deserving of architecture’s most ignoble accolade?

It’s the one award no architect wants to win, the trophy that won’t be taking pride of place on the mantelpiece. While buildings are daily showered with prizes for the best use of bricks and wood, for finely poured concrete and the most elegant windows, the accolade that haunts them all is rearing its ugly head once again.

Holding up a dark mirror to the Stirling prize, the Carbuncle Cup singles out the worst offenders of the year, the abominations that blight our skylines and bully our streets, the mean-minded developer tat that clutters cities up and down the country. From botched renovations to bloated towers, it awards the most heinous “crimes against architecture” – or crimes against the public.

Carbuncle Cup: Walkie Talkie wins prize for worst building of the year Read more

Buildings are one of the few things you can’t escape. You don’t have to watch a bad play. You’re not forced to go and look at an ugly painting, or sit through a terrible piece of music. But architecture is here, there and everywhere, from the dingy station entrance you were made to shuffle through this morning to the low-ceilinged, deep-plan office you might be sitting in while you’re reading this.

In 2015, the hated gong was bestowed on one of the most visible eyesores around, a building that stands as both a diagram of greed and the whims of the City of London’s planning system. Swelling as it rises, London’s Walkie Talkie is the ultimate symbol of a city where developers call the shots.

But it’s everyday bodging that can be more damaging, from the prefab schools-disguised-as-sheds to the badly planned apartment blocks shooting up on urban peripheries and stacked hutches of fast-buck student flats. These buildings don’t grab the headlines, but they make all our lives immeasurably worse.

Once again, this year’s shortlist is a wretched crop. From psychedelic chequerboards to sci-fi hulks, feast your eyes on these magnificent monstrosities.

Saffron Square, Croydon, by Rolfe Judd

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Saffron Square, Croydon Photograph: bdonline

Marketed as “a dominant focal point for the new Croydon skyline”, this Berkeley Homes development is certainly hard to miss, standing as one of the first of new-look Croydon’s novelty lineup, only to be trumped by the forthcoming Odalisk. Clad with a pixelated bruise of bright purples and reds, it looks as if it has already suffered a vicious beating at the hands of disgruntled residents.

One Smithfield, Stoke on Trent, by RHWL Architects

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One Smithfield, Stoke on Trent Photograph: Staffordshire University

Promised a “dynamic new city centre business and leisure destination designed for people and the modern occupier”, poor old Stoke ended up with a miserable box dressed in a cheap harlequin costume, a so-bad-it-might-almost-be-fashionable fusion of 80s classics Blockbusters and Connect 4. Or was it inspired by the pattern on the architect’s homepage?

The Diamond, University of Sheffield, by Twelve Architects

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Twelve Architects

The diamond-cladding craze continues with this £81m undergraduate engineering facility for the University of Sheffield, built to house 20,000 sq m of laboratories, lecture theatres and workshops inside its garish latticework garb. In one of the most tenuous justifications in the history of planning applications, the designers claim the pattern “references the stone tracery of an adjacent church”.

Poole Methodist Church extension by Intelligent Design Centre

Another building allegedly inspired by its ecclesiastical neighbour, the extension to Poole’s Methodist church sadly looks more like a pile of site Portakabins they forgot to remove. Its designers, the optimistically-named Intelligent Design Centre, might do well to think about a rebrand.

5 Broadgate, City of London, by Make Architects

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Make Architects

Rearing above the braying bankers’ den of Broadgate Circle like a silvery mothership from Tron, this gargantuan grey shed is the work of Ken “the Pen” Shuttleworth, designer of the Gherkin while at Foster’s, whose catalogue of carbuncles since leaving Norman’s side suggests the magic pen may well have belonged to someone else. A mute groundscraper slashed with gun-emplacement windows, you can’t help feeling 5 Broadgate is what the City deserves.

Lincoln Plaza, Isle of Dogs, by BUJ Architects

Perhaps the most representative building on the list of the kind of lumpen, crazy-paving-clad dross that accounts for much modern residential development, Lincoln Plaza is Galliard Homes’ latest gift to the Isle of Dogs, proving that it’s not just banks that know how to desecrate the skyline. With jutting cantilevers, random voids and a frenzy of bolt-on balconies, it is yet more proof that busy isn’t always best.