257

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ugliness, or the cathectic

moment of modulation between
terror and the comic
in postmodern architecture
Wouter Van Acker

The word ‘ugly’ comes from an Old Norse word meaning ‘to be feared
or dreaded’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Gretchen
E.  Henderson argues that throughout time, what ‘we’ judge to be ugly,
out of fear of certain objects and subjects which we perceive as strange
or ‘other’, has shifted.1 In a series of publications from the late 1950s and
1960s, modernist architects attributed the horrific nature of the uglification
of the urban landscape to the unbridled process of urbanization and subur-
banization and a lack of planning regulations. Their wistful aesthetic gaze at
the terrifying scenery of urban sprawl was primarily articulated by employ-
ing the notion of ugliness, rousing a sensation of anxiety for an uncontrolled
and unstoppable commercialization and car-oriented decentralization of the
urban environment. In the 1950s, The Architectural Review was an outlet
where protagonists of the Townscape movement such as Hubert de Cronin
Hastings, Gordon Cullen and Ian Nairn proposed picturesque urban design
methods to counter the increasing urban blight. In Outrage (1955) and
Counter-Attack against Subtopia (1957), Nairn proclaimed ‘a prophecy
of doom’ about the ‘morbid condition’ of what he dubbed ‘subtopia’ or
‘the world of universal low-density mess’.2 In Robin Boyd’s The Australian
Ugliness (1960) and Donald Gazzard’s Australian Outrage (1966), the
authors lamented the degenerate nature of the urban environment and

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called the profession to arms to brace against this menace of visual decay.3
In the United States in 1964, Peter Blake published God’s Own Junkyard,
in which he showed with aerial photographs the cancerous breaking down
of the original ‘beautiful’ American landscape into ‘the biggest slum on the
face of the earth’.4 The socialist architect Renaet Braem labelled Belgium
‘the ugliest country in the world’ in his book of 1968 with the same title
(in Dutch) that vilified the effects of the 1948 Act in Belgium, passed by the
Catholic government, that gave subsidies to families to construct and own
their own houses. He fulminated against the lack of planning regulations
and the promotion of a suburban, family-oriented model that accelerated
the sprawl of detached houses over the countryside and intensified ‘land
speculation, ribbon development and the rise of ugliness’.5
Starting with a discussion of how terror and ugliness were linked in the
literature mentioned above, with a focus on Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness,
this essay retraces and analyses how postmodern architects like Denise
Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan  –
who founded the firm Edmond & Corrigan in 1975 – and Rem Koolhaas
responded to this outrage and indignation over the uglification of the urban
landscape. They wrote of ugliness as something other than ‘to be feared or
dreaded’, and in their architectural projects, they demonstrated how one
‘must know how to make the best of ugliness itself’, to use Koolhaas’s defi-
nition of the ugly.6 Through their eyes, I examine the relationships between
the ugly, the ordinary and the monstrous, which provided the structure for
the two sections of this volume, in the light of a different dynamic, namely
the modulation between the terrible and the comic.

Larger than the real: The man-made monster

of suburbanization
In the opening line of The Australian Ugliness, ‘The ugliness I mean is skin
deep’, Boyd makes clear that the book, published in 1960, is positioned
within the debate about ugliness and outrage in response to the degradation
of the built environment and the failure of the planning and design profes-
sion to steer the forces of modernization in the right direction. Unlike other
laments about the effects of the roadside blight on the landscape, Boyd’s
judgement of ugliness is not only a moral, socio-critical assessment of the
trajectory of Australian architecture but also an explicit aesthetic critique of
cultural and social behaviour.7 He argues that, just as we try to hide anxi-
ety below our skin, the commercial veneer that covers the urban landscape
camouflages the ugly feeling of anxiety caused by domestic dementia and
national self-denial. ‘There can be few other nations which are less certain
than Australia as to what they are and where they are’, Boyd says.8 To com-
pensate for this absence Australian architecture borrows from ‘three remote

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UGLINESS, BETWEEN TERROR AND THE COMIC 269

restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible’.48

Satire in the work of Edmond & Corrigan is a reflexive reaction, which they
direct to expose the latent Eurocentric puritanic model of modernism and of
Boyd’s generation that followed. This comic exposure calls to mind Fischer’s
observation that jokes relate to the ugly in the way they ‘bring forward
something that is concealed or hidden’:49

If it [what is ugly] is concealed, it must be uncovered in the light of the

comic way of looking at things if it is noticed only a little or scarcely at
all, it must be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and
open to the light of day.50

If the ugly can become ‘the site where multiple cultural tensions are negoti-
ated’,51 then satire as it manifests itself in the work of Edmond & Corrigan,
makes the ugly appear clearly as an ‘obstacle’, inhibiting the interrogation
of various models of identity, ‘and in that way draws pleasure from a source
which the obstacle had made inaccessible’.52

Act II: Robert Venturi’s irony of the interesting

Because ugliness is unavoidably tied to reality, it lends itself well to being
modulated into the horrible as much as into the comic, because both gen-
res depend on imagining what might be. The ugly in itself is not funny or
terrible, it has to be staged to be experienced as such. The ugly becomes
laughable when we read into it a comic human attitude or expression. Henri
Bergson acknowledges that while ‘a landscape may be beautiful, charming
and sublime or insignificant and ugly[,] it will never be laughable. You may
laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human
attitude or expression.’53 Extending Bergson’s reasoning, we can say that
when we laugh at a building, we are making fun of ‘the human caprice
whose mould it assumed’.
Similarly to the comic, the horrible is not an objective quality of an
object; the subject has to imagine that quality or attribute it to the object.
Our reflexive response to ugliness is to dismiss or negate it, and therefore
it easily triggers contempt. As Nietzsche observes of contempt, ‘There is
indeed too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking
away and impatience involved in [it], even too much joyfulness, for it to be
able to transform its object into a real … monster.’54 For ugliness to appear
as horrible, then, ugliness has to be magnified to the point where it appears
contagious, intolerable and disgusting.
This movement of ugliness – its vivacity – between the comic and the hor-
rible, when instrumentalized in an architectural project, turns into an imbal-
ance. Whether this imbalance is considered to follow the logic of cathexis

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270 ARCHITECTURE AND UGLINESS

or catharsis is very much a consequence of discursive interpretation, of the

positioning and staging of a project in relation to the spectator or user and
the user’s capacity for a range of reflexive reactions.
The work of Venturi and Scott Brown intentionally effectuates a failure
of dramatic catharsis through a cathectic charge with all the complexities
and contradictions that are tied to an urban reality in which their ‘boring
architecture’ is wilfully imbedded.55 As Emmanuel Petit argues, Venturi fol-
lowed a model of irony or detachment from ideological prejudice character-
istic of a postmodern attitude that was driven by a desire to encapsulate a
plurality of contradictory meanings and diverging ways of interpreting the
world.56 A well-known example of this ironic stance is Venturi’s non-judge-
mental inversion of Peter Blake’s critical judgement of a typical American
Main Street as ‘almost all right’.
Irony is a stylistic device that presents both a view and its criticism at the
same time, and in its relativism takes on the appearance of self-criticism. The
originality of Learning from Las Vegas lies, according to Petit, in its way of
turning the interpretative methods of literary criticism – reading images as
texts – into an operative tool for producing architectural form. This opera-
tion consisted of sampling, recycling and recombining images within a field
of connotative meanings that went well beyond disciplinary limits, detach-
ing the aesthetic effects of images and photographs from their reality. Such
a double-edged appropriation of imagery was based on a New Critic’s idea
of aesthetic autonomy. This non-judgemental and detached aesthetic stance
enabled Venturi and Scott Brown, much like Pop artists in the 1950s and
1960s, to make a cultural pluralism appear in their architecture, exhibitions
and writings, though neutralized on the level on communication and media-
tion.57 Leaning on George Baird, Charles Jencks and Alan Colquhoun’s dis-
cussion of architecture as a ‘system of communications’ and on the work of
Pop artists who used unusual juxtapositions of the optical and the symbolic,
they developed methods of screening the conventional suburban landscape
for what was ‘interesting’.58
The anti-aesthetic value of ‘the interesting’ advanced in Learning from
Las Vegas extended the operational criticism of mannerist examples in
Complexity and Contradiction (1966) with the richness of communicative
qualities found in the ‘ugly and ordinary’ architecture of signs. Ugliness,
when embraced as a resource for artistic and architectural practices, takes
a form, as Cousins observes, that offers ‘to the undefended spectator or
reader a situation which is fundamentally interesting’,59 because its original
vivacity is partially lost, and rationalized, through aesthetic control. The
interesting as the anti-aesthetic value par excellence is essentially ambigu-
ous: its cultivation of reflexivity is contradicted by an affective relationship
to perception. The interesting, according to Jan Mieszkowski, is driven by
a ‘comparative dynamic’ that has no value without comparison.60 It results
from a contradiction of the visible and the mental, a dissonance between
knowledge and feeling, between abstract ideas and sensory experience.

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UGLINESS, BETWEEN TERROR AND THE COMIC 273

the cut-out, invoking multiple historical references such as the theme of the
‘wall’ and perimeter, which can be retraced to Koolhaas’s Berlin Wall 1971
thesis project, the theory of the decorated shed with the name ‘Guggenheim
Hermitage’ functioning as billboard, the identical soccles of the skyscrapers
in the City of the Captive Globe, and so on. OMA’s cut-out, which ironi-
cally presents itself as a form of inhibition, plays a witty game of ‘indirect
representations’ that challenge interpretation through a multiplication of
opposites.

Closing the curtain walls of ugliness

The way in which Venturi and Scott Brown, Edmond and Corrigan, and
Koolhaas recovered the cathexis, constructed discursively around the ugli-
ness of expansive (sub)urbanization, proved an important source for a post-
modern project they shared:  restaging modern architecture as what I  call
a double, comic scene; a condensed, allegorical mis-en-scene of ordinary
urbanness that is constructed self-reflexively as an anti-intellectual critique
on the place that it will take in the mediated archive of the architectural
discipline, where it will be shown, circulated and discussed. This ambiguity
and imbalance is what enables architecture to be both terrible and comic.
Charles Beaudelaire said, ‘Laughter is the revelation of the double’;70 it only
comes about when the incompatible contrast between ideas is found to be
capable of discharging at a particular moment. This discharge is, however,
not to be interpreted as purifying, therapeutic or cathartic but rather as an
unresolved non-catharsis that operates through a transition or modulation
in tone. Similar to the cinematic modulation of the horrible into the comic
by an awareness of fiction, which makes terror and violence bearable and
enjoyable because of the fleshliness of its ‘cool’, low-res visual effects71  –
a demand upon the subject to fill in the image – postmodern architecture
finds joy in framing a reflective play on the reality of representation. It com-
plies with architecture’s secondary role in the sphere of words and gestures,
appropriating and imitating the material world of the everyday that has
settled in a state of ennui.
It is at this level of dealing with the incompatible that the postmodern
architecture discussed in this chapter operates like a broken mirror, tradi-
tionally held to be the metaphor of ugliness, and converges and diverges
with the mirror curtain wall, – the recurring trope that characterizes post-
modernism. Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism as a ‘mirror spiral’ could
be considered a special case of the broken mirror. Unlike the mirror that
one looks through, the mirror curtain wall and the broken mirror are to
be looked at. Refraction and fracture stand for the discontinuation of
the mirror as a metaphor of truth, and by extension, the discontinuation

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of the modernist episteme of transparency and knowledge as a faithful

representation.

Notes
1 Gretchen E. Henderson, Ugliness: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion
Books, 2015), 17–18.
2 Ian Nairn, Outrage (London: Architectural Press, 1955), 373; Ian Nairn,
Counter Attack against Subtopia (London: Architectural Press, 1957).
3 Donald Gazzard, ed., Australian Outrage. The Decay of a Visual Environment
(Sydney: Ure Smith, 1966); Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness
(Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2010). See especially Mathew
Aitchison on the transatlantic history of the ugliness and outrage debate, in
‘The Boyd Ultimatum’, AA Files, no. 66 (2013): 59–67.
4 Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s
Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), 8.
5 Renaet Braem, Het Lelijkste Land Ter Wereld (Brussel: VUB-Press, 1968), 15
(translated from the Dutch by Wouter van Acker).
6 The quote is from the dictionary included in S,M,L,XL: ‘Ugly. You must know
how to make the best of ugliness itself’, in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau.
S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997).
7 Naomi Stead, ‘(Not So) Anti-Architecture’, Places Journal (October 2017).
8 Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, 71.
9 Ibid., 73
10 Ibid., 264.
11 Ibid., 265.
12 Emma Jones, ‘Rediscovering The Australian Ugliness: Robin Boyd and the
Search for the Australian Modern’, sITA Journal 2 (2014): 94–114.
13 On Boyd as an author, see Philip Goad, ‘Robin Boyd and the Art of Writing
Architecture’ in Semi-Detached: Writing, Representation and Criticism in
Architecture, ed. Naomi Stead (Melbourne: Uro, 2012).
14 Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly [part 1]’, AA files 28 (1994): 61–4; Mark Cousins,
‘The Ugly [part 2]’, AA Files 29 (1995): 3–6; Mark Cousins, ‘The Ugly
[part 3]’, AA files 30 (1995): 68.
15 Cousins, ‘The Ugly [part 1]’, 64.
16 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, in Content, ed. Rem Koolhaas (Köln: Taschen,
2004), 162.
17 Mark Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, Word & Image 16, no.
3 (2000): 310–16.
18 Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 1261 and 1262 (emphasis in original).
19 Terry Kirk, ‘Monumental’, Perspecta 40, special issue ‘Monster’ (2008): 11.

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