Ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
And, it's worth pointing out, our ideas of what's ugly can change.
In 1977, Frank Gehry wrapped his own house, a middle-class bungalow in Santa Monica, Calif., in a cocoon of corrugated sheet metal, chain-link screening and unpainted plywood. Neighbors were outraged, and an architecture writer who lived down the street trained his dog to relieve itself on Gehry's lawn each night.
Today, architecture aficionados flock to the house, which is widely viewed as a conceptual predecessor to Gehry's exuberant, chaotic masterpieces such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
The broader lesson: Buildings that shatter norms often incite friction, and only time can reveal whether they're truly ugly or represent a new version of what's beautiful.
But certain buildings, like those in this rogue's gallery, are so bad that they seem utterly unlikely to rise to the level of good or even mediocre.
So why bother with them?
While none will ever make the pages of an architecture magazine, they do make a city and its region, and their impact is pernicious. What we're talking about is the vernacular -- the everyday, not the extraordinary such as Millennium Park. Many of these buildings are troubling because they're not one-of-a-kind ugly, but all-over-the-place ugly, endlessly replicated like acne on a teenager's face.
There's no better (or worse) example than the crudely designed brick and cinderblock condos that are blighting neighborhoods throughout Chicago. They're reprising the damage done half a century earlier by the notorious four-plus-one apartment blocks.
Another theme that crops up in this roll of dishonor is the blank-walled building, or architecture without a face. While great architects are capable of turning nearly windowless walls into art -- think of Le Corbusier's sculpted pilgrimage chapel in Ronchamp, France -- lesser talents can do enormous damage, as we see with the Clark Place Apartments in Lincoln Park.
For centuries, architects have understood beauty in anthropomorphic terms. The French word facade means "face," as in a child's drawing of a house, which suggests eyes, a nose and a mouth. A building without a face is an affront to this norm. How do you talk to someone without a face?
Another recurring theme: Slapdash construction.
Buildings, Roman architect and author Vitruvius wrote, should exhibit the qualities of firmness (solid construction), commodity (usefulness and convenience) and delight (giving pleasure and enjoyment).
This certainly doesn't describe the crazy quilt of tar paper, wood and other low-rent materials on the two-story building at 2431 N. Lincoln Ave., which happens to sit right next to the landmark Biograph Theater. Gehry might have been able to turn chain-link into alluring "cheapskate architecture." But this is just plain cheapskate.
The real estate mantra of "location, location, location" applies equally to ugliness. The more prominent the location, the higher the architectural expectations -- and the deeper the sense of dread if the design flops.
A case in point: the Savant Medical Supply building, 1215 S. Harlem Ave. in Forest Park. Stick it on a back street away from thousands of passing cars, and hardly anyone would notice. On a heavily trafficked thoroughfare, its blight is unavoidable.
Today, in the wake of the critical acclaim lavished on Millennium Park and Mayor Richard M. Daley's efforts to promote sustainable "green" architecture, Chicago is earning a well-deserved international reputation as a hotbed of design innovation.
But the region's nooks and crannies reveal a picture that is more complex, as it has always been: The Janus-faced city of Nelson Algren -- gorgeous here, ugly there, with the two sometimes cheek-by-jowl.