The winner of the 2017 Carbuncle Cup has recently been announced. The award has the ironic prestige of being the least prestigious award in British architecture, as the cup is awarded to the British building voted to be the “worst” built over the past year. This year?s winner is a mixed-use development next to Victoria Station in London. The Nova Victoria complex by architectural firm PLP Architecture was shortlisted by judges for its misguided use of angular facades, which aim to break up the volume of the development. Currently, the buildings house offices, retailers, apartments, and community spaces.

Thomas Lane of Building Design magazine (BD) says of the complex: ?The architect, PLP, has attempted to break up the monolithic nature of the scheme by expressing it as a pair of sliced and chamfered towers and jazzing it up with several bright red prows presumably to give it that ‘landmark’ quality.” This scathing critique of Nova Victoria was surely a contributing factor to it’s taking the crown for the year?s worst building, as Lane himself was on the judging panel, along with BD assistant editor Elizabeth Hopkirk, urbanist David Rudlin, and Twentieth Century Society director Catherine Croft.
The Carbuncle Cup has been around since 2006 and is intended to act as a counterpoint to honorable architectural accolades such as the Stirling Prize. The term ?carbuncle? came into popular usage in an architectural context after Prince Charles, ...