Table of Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Retracing the Ugly and the Anti-aesthetic as a Productive Force in Postmodern Architecture
Wouter Van Acker, (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

1. Ugliness, the anti-aesthetic and appropriation: with some remarks on the architecture of ARM
John Macarthur, (University of Queensland, Australia)

2. On Ugliness (in Architecture)
Bart Verschaffel, (Ghent University, Belgium)

PART 1: UGLY AND MONSTROUS

3. Instrumentalizing Ugliness: Parallels between High Victorian and Brutalist Architecture
Timothy M. Rohan, (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA)

4. Monstrous Becomings: A Minor Cartography
Heidi Sohn, (TU Delft, the Netherlands)

5. Faux Monumentality in Ricardo Bofill’s Les espaces d'Abraxas
Thomas Mical,(Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)

6. Post-communism and the Monstrous: Skopje 2014 and Other Political Tales
Mirjana Lozanovska, (Deakin University, Australia)

7. Here be Monsters
Andrew Leach, (The University of Sydney, Australia)

8. To Make Monsters
Caroline O’Donnell, (Cornell University, USA)

PART 2: UGLY AND ORDINARY

9. ‘Ugly’: The Architecture of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
Deborah Fausch

10. Camp Ugliness: The Case of Charles W. Moore
Patricia A. Morton, (University of California, Riverside, USA)

11. Architecture in El Alto: the Politics of Excess
Elisabetta Andreoli

12. The Critical Kitsch of Alchimia and Memphis: Design by Media
AnnMarie Brennan, (University of Melbourne, Australia)

13. The Immediacy of Urban Reality in Postwar Italy: Between Neorealism’s and Tendenza’s Instrumentalization of Ugliness
Marianna Charitonidou, (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)

14. Ugliness as Aesthetic Friction: Renewing Architecture Against the Grain
Lara Schrijver, (University of Antwerp, Belgium)

15. Ugliness, or the Cathectic Moment of Modulation between Terror and the Comic in Postmodern Architecture
Wouter Van Acker, (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

Index

Promotional Information

Rethinking ugliness in architecture - from brutalism to postmodernism.

About the Author

Wouter Van Acker is chargé de cours (Associate Professor) and Chair of Architectural Theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium.

Thomas Mical is Professor of Architectural Theory and Head of the School of Art and Design of Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. He is the author of Surrealism and Architecture (2004).

Reviews

A wonderfully rich and stimulating collection of essays, which plumbs the fraught nooks and crannies of the ugly’s discursive terrain. Taken together, the detailed case studies build a satisfyingly variegated account of the complex play of fascination and repulsion that attends aberrant form and architecture’s negotiations with it since the mid-twentieth century.
*Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh, UK*