The ugly truth

Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s not even about what ugliness is, or why our understanding of what it is see-saws so violently. We don’t learn why people once loathed John Nash’s All Souls at Langham Place, one MP calling it ‘a horrible object’, or what insanity led Edwin Lutyens to condemn — as ‘an ugly angle’ — roofs slanted at 45 degrees.

The mud-slinging doesn’t interest Hyde. How the slung mud shapes us excites him much more. Arguments over ugliness, he contends, are never just about aesthetics. They’re a proxy for social, political, even theological, concerns. When William Morris denounced the ‘sickening hideousness’ of London’s architecture, he was really having a go at commerce. To call out ugliness, then, is a call to arms. While beauty basks lazily and uselessly in its own perfection, ugliness spurs us into action.