Carbuncle Cup Shortlist 2016

Saffron Square, London by Rolfe Judd

The south London borough of Croydon is in the throes of regeneration and has been revealed this week as having the UK’s fastest-growing local economy. But one imagines that this is in spite of rather than because of its brand new tallest building. Berkeley Homes’ latest offering has been variously described by our readers as having a “car crash of a façade” and “a cheap and less subtle version of Manchester’s Beetham Tower”. Croydon may be laying claim to being south London’s Silicon Valley but if it keeps on producing buildings like this the grass may well be greener elsewhere.

The Diamond, University of Sheffield by Twelve Architects

Many have struggled to define what the Northern Powerhouse actually is and this building’s unsettling similarity to a hydroelectric plant will not help. The allusions are not accidental, the new building provides accommodation for Sheffield University’s engineering students. And with the efficiency of a twin-thrust turbo engine, it commits sins on both the outside and the inside. Its desecration of a helpless neighbouring church is successively described by the nominator and a reader as “dwarfing” and “drowning” and space inside is also pronounced as “wasted”, “unused” and “outrageously mismanaged”.

One Smithfield, Stoke on Trent by RHWL Architects

Regeneration has been long been hijacked as a vehicle for poor architecture and this is a classic example. An aesthetic mutation between the nostalgic 1980s brain games of Connect 4 and Blockbusters might not seem like a natural breeding ground for architectural malevolence but this building proves what happens when colour goes rogue. Our readers pilloried Stoke on Trent’s new council offices as being “hideous”, “nasty” and “awful”. But one saving grace is that its alleged role as a catalyst for local regeneration means that there are few buildings nearby forced to view it – yet.

Poole Methodist Church extension by Intelligent Design Centre

Never has the aphorism “it’s not the size that counts” rung truer. This extension to Poole Methodist Church may be small, but the sheer scale of its deficiencies reverberate far and wide across the grim spectrum of planning failure and architectural blight. Not only is the current scheme the result of a bizarre planning episode that appears to have saddled Poole and its fine Methodist church with a scheme that looks remarkably similar to a previously rejected one, but the building screams of the same bland, belligerent mediocrity that is the insidious moniker of ostensibly polite and ubiquitous background architecture everywhere. The nominator rightly describes the building as “an unimaginative grey box” but its subtle subterfuge is such that it could easily slip into town, street or village near you.

5 Broadgate, London, by Make Architects

When the developers behind the horrendous 22 Bishopsgate describe your building as “the worst large building in the City for 20 years” you know you’re in trouble. In a distinction only previously enjoyed by the Walkie Talkie, we received nominations for 5 Broadgate long before it was finished. 5 Broadgate has already been widely savaged in multiple quarters but in a withering citation the nominator variously described it as a “mute steel fortress” and “a flak tower that gives nothing back to the city”. This nomination also attracted the most comments from our readers with one claiming that its “greatest tragedy” was its demolition of “what was there before”.

Lincoln Plaza, London by BUJ Architects

Every now and then a project comes along that simply beggars belief. This is one of them. 31 storeys of bilious cladding are piled one on top of the other to create an assortment of haphazardly assembled facades that are crude, jarring and shambolic. Were that not enough the facades enwrap a grotesque Jenga game of rabid rectilinear blocks of no discernible form or profile and perforated by a series of balconies which one reader surmises are “an open invitation to commit suicide”. Another bluntly sums up the question we all ask when faced with horror shows like this: “How do these things get planning approval?”