The lovely new Cutty Sark The Carbuncle Cup is the one no architect wants to win. Awarded by the architecture trade journal Building Design, it punishes the very worst of new British buildings every year, and I am delighted to see that the destruction of the Cutty Sark by Grimshaw & Partners has made the nominations list. In what has rightly been described by one commenter as a "cultural crime," the 1869 tea-clipper has had a glass lift punched through it and two more run up its side in a blobby new tower-block. It has been dangled on girders twenty feet in the air and a giant smoked-glass screen run all around it, obliterating the ship's thrilling lines, in order to create a space they can hire out for corporate events. The whole thing has cost £50 million, double the planned budget, the vast majority of it from the public purse. You can read my full account of this heartbreaking disaster here. But in the meantime, please do visit the Carbuncle Cup page on the Building Design website and make a comment: the schemes with the most comments will go through to the shortlist.Cutty Sark horror nominated as worst new building in Britain
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
We appear to be living in an Orwellian nightmare. What's the matter with these fools, they seem to be determined to destroy everything good in Britain. M.
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