Some Time ago, Architecture Talk released the “Top 10 Ugly Buildings in China in 2020” list. It is reported that the preliminary selection was made by public vote, and the second round was made by seven professional judges, including scholars of architecture and art history from the China Academy of Art, professorial senior architects from the China Institute of Architecture, and associate professors from the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University, for the final evaluation. What buildings are on the list?
Why are they on the list?
The Guangzhou Rongchuang Grand Theatre, which was ranked first on the list, was designed by a British architectural firm. According to the introduction, its design concept drew on the embroidery patterns of artist Zhang Hongfei and was inspired by silk, with the red skin symbolizing flame-like Chinese Culture, while signifying good luck, festivity and joy.
However, the concept was not well received by everyone, with some netizens commenting that it resembled a flower quilt or embroidered shoes, and the judges giving the reason “the idea was far-fetched, with a haphazard collage of Chinese elements and a grotesque form that hurt the city’s image”.
The 11th list of China’s top 10 ugly buildings in 2020. Source: Screenshot from the website.
Wang Mingxian, a scholar of architecture and art history at the China Academy of Art and an expert at the High Precision Innovation Center of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said in an interview with CNN, “This is actually Chinese elements in the eyes of the Other and applied vulgarly, capitalizing on the crude destruction of the public space of Guangzhou’s historic and cultural city.”
The second-place winner, Jilin Yanbian Changbai Tiandi Resort, resembles the word “mountain” with a roof like a giant ski, similar to the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore, and was commented by the jury as “rigid in form, exaggerated and crude, out of scale and a huge waste.
Source: Screenshot of the website.
The third place is Chongqing Wulong’s “Netflix attraction” Flying Kiss, representing Prince Charming and the Tea Fairy’s two flying islands can rotate up and frame “kissing” at high altitude, the design idea from the local folk love story: the East Sea Dragon King Ao Guang’s son Ao Miao Feng and the Seven Fairies Zhang Tianyang love at first sight, and then by the Queen Mother’s stick to beat the lovebirds, turned into the White Horse Mountain and Fairy Mountain.
Source: Website screenshot.
But because the shape is too peculiar, it was also once evaluated by netizens as “giants on the Food” and “gourd children carrying bird cages”. Wang Mingxian believes that this is a shoddy tourist service construction facility, and an extremely poor dynamic landscape sculpture. The person in charge of the project design had explained that the main reason why the project was trolled after landing was because of the disconnect between construction and program design.
Along with the list of Nanjing, Jiangsu Beehive Hotel, Hebei Cangzhou Wuqiao International Acrobatic Theater, Guangxi Hechi Danquan Wine Culture Museum, Guangdong Maoming Youth Activity Center, Shaanxi Baoji Union Bridge and other buildings, the reasons are also various, such as “claptrap”, “blindly foreign”, “vulgar intention”, “design techniques patchwork.
Source: Screenshot of the website.
Among them, the more controversial at the time of selection is the new Jiangxi Provincial Library. After the list was announced, Wang Mingxian also received text messages from fellow architects discussing that it was not considered particularly ugly.
Wang Mingxian believes that this building is not malicious to wow the public, but reflects a banal ugly phenomenon, if it is a small building in a small county, perhaps will not find it problematic, but as a provincial library, it appears in a very important urban public space, the requirements naturally have to become high.
Source: Screenshot of the website.
In addition, experts consider the academic perspective of architectural design, that its design language is confusing, “this building does not have the characteristics of cultural architecture, the average person looking over may not think that this is a library, may think it is a high-speed railway station.”
“This is a phenomenon worth thinking about”, said Zhou Rong, an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Architecture, “It wastes a very big investment and opportunity, and then comes up with a relatively ugly building, which is not easy to be taken seriously compared to a building with features, but instead brings wider social harm.”
Ten years after the selection, has the style of “ugly” changed?
From 2010 to 2020, the “Top 10 Ugly Buildings in China” campaign has been held for eleven years. The organizer, Architecture Talk, said its original intention was “to provoke people to think about the beauty and ugliness of architecture and to enhance the sense of social responsibility of those working in the construction industry”.
On January 21, 2011, the first “China’s Top 10 Ugly Buildings” list was released, with buildings such as the Yuanbao Temple in Handan, Hebei, which resembles a large treasure, the Beijing Tianzi Hotel in Yanjiao, Hebei, which is shaped like a colorful sculpture of three stars, and the Wuliangye Wine Bottle Building in Yibin, Sichuan, which looks like a giant wine bottle, on the list.
Wang Mingxian introduced that each year’s selection is first voted by netizens to determine the list, and then finalized by professional judges, who are mostly famous Chinese architects and architectural critics with decades of experience in architectural experiments and architectural research.
In 2010, more than 50 experts in the field studied and discussed and determined nine criteria for selecting ugly buildings, including extremely unreasonable building use functions, extremely incompatible with natural conditions and the surrounding environment, plagiarism and imitation, foreign imitation, clumsy symbols, vulgarity of physical appearance, etc.
The results of the first (top, 2010) and tenth (bottom, 2019) “Ugly Architecture Awards”. Source: Screenshot of the website.
According to Zhou Rong, the selection of ugly architecture itself also shows a historical change, as the early cottage White House, the foreign-style government buildings, and the Gold-worshiping buildings imitating gold yuanbao and big copper coins have very obvious limitations of the times.
Today, the causes behind the ugly buildings have obviously changed, and the naked foreign or gold-worshiping architecture is gradually decreasing, but it will appear in another way. For example, Guangzhou Rongchuang Grand Theater is a simple and crude way for foreign architects to understand Chinese culture, and the Flying Kiss is a crude way to express traditional culture, which also brings new problems.
At the launch of the 11th edition of the competition, the organizer wrote that in recent years, many cities have accelerated the pace of urbanization, with construction time “high-speed”, skyscrapers “intensive”, and cultural landmarks “Netflix” becoming the construction standards for many new buildings, resulting in many fast-developing non-first-tier cities gradually falling into the disaster area of “ugly architecture”.
Source: Screenshot of the website.
Zhou Rong cited the example of the Jilong Fort Hotel in Guizhou’s Xingyi Wanfeng Lake, which has a Western-style castle directly on the original karst landscape, “The aesthetic lag between fourth- and fifth-tier cities and first-tier cities is also a phenomenon worthy of alarm. In the past, we focused more on first-tier cities, but this time we also took out some cases from other cities, such as Guizhou Xinyi and Shaanxi Baoji, because they already have a current typicality.”
“Ugly buildings” selection, not just lively
Ten years have passed, and what started as a slightly flirtatious selection among peers has now become one of the annual events in cities and architecture that all parties pay attention to. In addition to these “ugly buildings” on the list, news about “rustic shopping malls” and “magical attractions” are often hotly debated on the Internet.
Jin’ao Pavilion in Baiyangdian Lotus Grand View Park in Hebei was selected as one of the top 10 ugly buildings in China in 2017. Source: Website screenshot.
According to Wang Mingxian, a scholar of architecture and art history at the China Academy of Art and an expert at the High Precision Innovation Center of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, this is actually the beginning and experiment of new architectural criticism in the Internet era. In the past, architectural criticism was mostly limited to professional discussions in professional journals, but now it can attract the participation and discussion of many netizens, which also promotes mutual learning and understanding between architects and the public.
In addition to the gradual decrease of “original ugly buildings”, Wang Mingxian also found that there are new changes in the consideration of ugly buildings, for example, the first places on the list in 2019 and 2020 are considered for the damage of buildings to the urban environment, especially the damage to the image of historical and cultural cities, “we start to consider architecture more from the perspective of the city”.
Source: Screenshot of the website.
He confessed that the selection of ugly buildings over the years, there will also be architects who wish to come to communicate when they are candidates, but the expert jury still insists on being realistic and will not consider human feelings and other reasons.
A city building has gone through a rather complicated process from design drawings to becoming an entity. Wang Mingxian said that he was actually very apprehensive every time the selection was made, but at the same time, he believed that the selection also provided a good guidance for future architectural design, so that the relevant management, architects, and A-parties would have a change of values.
Source: Screenshot of the website.
In the view of Zhou Rong, an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Architecture, “ugly architecture already has some kind of cultural deterrent effect to a large extent, there is a kind of value benchmarking role, if one says which buildings are good, the public attention may not be that high, we hope that the bottom line of Chinese architecture is not low to the dirt, ugly architecture is like the Damocles sword, the deterrent power of this cultural bottom line is actually very valuable The.”
“We also see that as the ugly architecture selection campaign continues, there are now fewer and fewer ugly buildings of the earlier kind, and now the ugly buildings have changed their faces to appear in new ways, and we will also seize the first signs of this to attack and criticize.”
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