Slugs and jack-fruit

Architectural Review, The, May, 2004 by George Yuille Caldwell

SIR: Birmingham and Graz now share examples of your 'Monstrosities'.

Good, new architecture surely should be neighbourly, not just 'creative interventions', any old how. With others there before them, it is quite ill-mannered to be quite so pushy.

The place for such ugly 'avant-garde' building is on an island site, as for a museum or new gallery, or in a fairground, temporarily. Those two designs are both more suited to a Pleasure Beach or Coney Island.

The Graz roofline, at first thought of as a joke, is a grotesque interloper, a piece of colossal architectural whimsy that fits into the category of 'Mum! Look what I did, Mum! Look! Mum?' A form of self-exhibitionism.

Such clowning and clevering! And you too are pleased with it. The Birmingham blob resembles more an overripe blue jack-fruit, and that Graz slug-like other-thing something execrable, or excretable, what has been dropped by some giant passing bird. Not at all nice!

It is meant as a joke, isn't it?

Yours etc

GEORGE YUILLE CALDWELL

Singapore