The rise and rise of ugly buildings

An inelegant new neighbour to Foyles bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road is typical of buildings whose components seem to have met on a blind date. So how do they end up like this?It 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 2