The Rotch Travelling Scholarship

The Rotch Travelling Scholarship is an annual two-stage design competition that results in one person, deemed the Rotch Scholar, traveling the world for eight months studying architecture. In the first stage of the selection process, a weekend-long preliminary design competition is held. Finalists from this competition go on to compete in the second stage, a 10-day competition culminating in a design presentation to a distinguished jury in Boston.

More information about requirements and schedule in the competition’s official website.

Illustrations: Above, Boston City Hall, by Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood, interior of Boston City Hall, the site of Boston City Hall before demolition, winning entry in Rotch contest, proposal for a new Boston City Hall, by Aaron Helfand, of Cambridge

The ugliest building in Providence? Pick it.

The Boston Globe's architecture critic, Robert Campbell, asked his readers to do that for Boston in his Feb. 21 column on the passion mustered by the British against ugly architecture. In "Should this building be razed? Says whom?" Campbell reported that the Bournemouth Waterfront Leisure Complex had been voted off the island.

The Bournemouth complex, in Dorset, built in 1998 and flagged as Britain'sugliest building by the viewers of public television's Channel 4 show "Demolition" in 2005, has a date with the wrecking ball. Demolition contracts worth £7.5 million were signed by the borough council in January.

Good riddance!

"I'd like to see that passion here," wrote Campbell. He solicited e-mails and published the results on March 21 in his column "Ugly is in the eye of the beholder." The envelope, please: "The ugliest building in Greater Boston is Boston City Hall. At least, that's the opinion of Globe readers."

Bostonians have hated Boston City Hall since its completion, in 1968. Mayor Thomas Menino proposed its demolition but has backed off. Efforts to mitigate its harsh impact are regularly announced and regularly go nowhere

Most recently, young architects competing for the annual Rotch prize, sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects, were asked to soften the expanse around Boston City Hall known as City Hall Plaza. Each finalist offered a similar proposal, each a version of the same mistake, each a mixture of glass and steel angularities extending City Hall's lower levels into the plaza to contain, say, a museum. Each young architect ignored the central fact that City Hall Plaza can't be softened without first razing City Hall. The winning entry was by Christopher Shusta, a graduate of Harvard's Graduate School of Design who works in Princeton, N.J. He got a 

$37,000 scholarship to take a worldwide architecture tour, and will surely return even more invigorated by architecture's worst ideas.

It's not fuh nuttin that Boston City Hall was designed in a style of modern architecture known as Brutalism, after the French term béton brut, concrete in the raw, and aptly described by the Penguin Dictionary of Architecture as "big chunky members which collide ruthlessly."

[The final illustration is a proposed new city hall for Boston by Aaron Helfand, a recent graduate of Notre Dame now working for Albert, Righter & Tittmann, I found while trolling for illustrations in an online Globe article linked to from its slide show of the Rotch contest winners. More on this proposal coming up soon in a new blog post, including an odd coincidence.]

"It's interesting," wrote Campbell in summarizing the readers' choices, "that except for Fenway Park [!], which was trashed for its 'poor sight lines, [and] uncomfortable seats,' no reader listed an old building. All are relatively modern." That does not surprise me in the least. "Tastes change," he wrote in his February column, "and today's ugly can be tomorrow's beautiful. A few decades ago, 'Ugly Victorian' was almost a single word, like 'DamYankee.' Now Victorian is loved."

I would challenge the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty, or ugliness, is in the form of the beheld. Taste either perceives or fails to perceive it. Victorian architecture was never widely disliked. That is an urban myth, perhaps a fiction of the modernist thought police. By the 1950s, our cities (and our Victorians) had been allowed to deteriorate through depression and war. Instead of fixing them up we tore them down. Few love the urban renewal that "modernized" our cities.

A distinct minority of people have come, however, to appreciate modern architecture. That is a learned taste, a studied preference for the supposedly unconventional, whereas the appreciation of traditional forms of architecture is actually more innate. People who have jobs in the world of design often say they like modern architecture, but they probably live in an old Victorian