t would have looked good in the drawings: a balanced elevation of horizontals and verticals, solid and void, given depth with concave and convex panels, animated with patterns of roses in low relief. Echoes were possibly intended of the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries invested his pioneering structures with delightful ornament. Echoes, too, of Caruso St John and other contemporary architects, who for a decade or so have been reviving a Sullivanesque use of pattern. Yet this nine-storey creative industries development (plus four storeys underground), now rising in Charing Cross Road in London, doesn’t have the grace that this description suggests. Called Ilona Rose House, it is placed where Foyles bookshop once was, before that famous literary institution moved to a site next door. The new building’s inelegance is partly a matter of scale, for as with almost every new commercial building its volume has been amped up to maximise valuable floorspace. It is also a matter of detail – those rose patterns look mechanical and dead, and conspicuous joints between the panels give it an unsubstantial, just-bolted-together feel. Notwithstanding the fact that it is clad in quite expensive concrete, it looks plasticky, while the floral motif distances itself insufficiently from the packaging of bathroom tissues. Strange things happen down one side of the building, where vague variations on brick Georgian houses – presumably in reference to Soho’s historic architecture – grind awkwardly against the pre-cast Chicagoisms . The rhythms clunk and jar. Ilona Rose House is by no means the worst. (For that you might have to go to the south side of the Thames, to a Hieronymus Bosch-type garden of monsters known as the Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea Opportunity Area.) But it does prompt the WTF feeling common when encountering new buildings in British streets, from which a question then follows: how did it get to be the way it is? A Twitter shout-out yields a rich harvest. “Dear Twitter, is there an especially ugly new building near you?” I ask. Eamonn Canniffe in Manchester begs to differ with marketeers’ description of the Circle Square development as the city’s “most intriguing new neighbourhood”: he calls this assemblage of big, dark boxes “not just one building but a whole complex of gloom”. An Edinburgh respondent sends a glimpse of the trashy gold spiral of the W hotel, now rising over the New Town, already nicknamed “the Turd” by sceptical locals. In the bleak development zone known as North Cambridge there is a barracks-like new Novotel. Snaps of brutes are sent from Dallas and Toronto, which stand outside the UK-only brief of the present study, but which remind us that ugliness is universal. In comes Newington Court, a student housing block in north London that was completed some years ago, but is still worth a mention for its shroud of gratuitous aluminium mesh – as if some prophetic visionary had based an aesthetic on the metal fencing in which locked-down undergraduates are now caged – and for its sickly, synthetic-lemon-coloured walls. From the picturesque village of Lavenham in Suffolk comes an estate of your usual piggy-eyed, beige-brick houses, which very much does not have the “immediate sense of belonging” that its builders Marden Homes claim for it. Like the Cambridge Novotel and several other submissions, some of its greatest crimes are against landscape, the crucial part of design that is most often forgotten, with sad scraps of green struggling to assert themselves against car-friendly paving. It would be easy to say that these buildings are simply the products of meanness and greed, of property developers trying to maximise their floor area and minimise their expenditure. This is indeed often the case. There are serial offenders among building types, including student accommodation, mid-range hotels and rural housing, where deadly efficient formulae were established long ago, and innovation consists mostly of yet more ruthless ways to drive down costs. My Lavenham correspondent tells me, for example, that the Marden Homes scheme features porches apparently crafted out of timber and clay tiles, actually formed in all-in-one pieces of plastic. But it’s more complicated than that. A large factor is modern construction techniques, which systematise and compartmentalise the different parts of the building. If you see an older building that you like, whether Victorian or brutalist, it’s probable that there is some degree of integration and rapport between its parts, that the woodwork of a window frame might inflect towards the shape of its opening, or that the proportions of a balcony might relate to those of a lift tower. Modern buildings are mostly assemblies of factory-made packages, which get thrown together on building-site blind dates. Part of the queasiness on seeing Ilona Rose House comes from the sense that the moulded facade is a clip-on, that there is the same skinny frame behind it that there is on pretty much all new buildings of this type. It’s not that you can’t design good buildings with modern techniques, but it takes skill and thought. It also takes a degree of influence over detail that modern building contracts, which tend to empower contractors to do what they like, often deny to architects. And it’s not that architects are not trying, either – MATT Architecture and SODA, designers of Ilona Rose House, arguably try too hard. The not-yet-visible parts of their scheme include – in addition to the Sullivan and Georgian homages – ambitious cantilevers and modish, scooped-out shapes which can only have cost money that might have been better spent making the patterned facades really sing. It’s striking, too, that this project is in the City of Westminster, which is one of the more demanding planning authorities in the country. At Circle Square, the architects Feilden Clegg Bradley seem to have decided to go with the flow, to make a virtue of repetitive construction techniques, and create an austere look “informed” as they say “by the grand Victorian warehouses” of Manchester. Their problem might be that they have succeeded too well at evoking the blunt capitalism of the era of Friedrich Engels. Even the Cambridge Novotel has a few non-functional touches – a bit of textured brickwork, some curved corners – although they don’t dispel the impression that this is a building designed by a spreadsheet. “Stop all the architects now”, fulminated the critic Ian Nairn in these pages in 1966, “… the outstanding and appalling fact about modern architecture is that it is not good enough.” The truth is that ugly buildings have always been with us, and there’s only so much architects can do about it. So there’s no magic bullet. But it would help if everyone – architects, developers, builders, planners – had a stronger idea of what makes a building good, which starts with the way it is made.