{"id":611460,"date":"2026-04-18T02:07:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T02:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/611460\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T02:07:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T02:07:10","slug":"controversial-buildings-throughout-history-from-the-tower-of-babel-to-the-white-house-ballroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/611460\/","title":{"rendered":"Controversial Buildings Throughout History: From the Tower of Babel to the White House Ballroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to
Be Cultured<\/a> Menu Architecture and Design <\/p>\n

1. The Mythical Tower of Babel (10-7 B.C.)<\/p>\n

Heritage Images\/Hulton Fine Art Collection\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In the Bible, humanity attempts to build a tower to reach the heavens \u2014 until God scuppers everyone\u2019s plan by making them speak different languages and dispersing them across the world. \u201cIt\u2019s permanently the most controversial building because it can never be\u00a0completed,\u201d says the American architect Daniel Libeskind, 79. He considers the Tower of\u00a0Babel an ancestor to other incomplete projects that illustrate humanity\u2019s hubris like the Line in northwest Saudi Arabia, an ongoing, albeit increasingly scaled-back, development that would include a carless 106-mile horizontal \u201cskyscraper\u201d stretched across the desert, and Palmanova, a turn-of-the-17th-century Italian fortress that was to encase an ideal city \u2014 if\u00a0only they could get anyone to live there.<\/p>\n

2. Casa del Fascio (1936) in Como, Italy, by\u00a0Giuseppe Terragni<\/p>\n

A former office of Italy\u2019s National Fascist Party, Casa del Fascio embodies \u201cthe tension between great architecture and the circumstances in which it was built,\u201d says the Japanese architect Toshiko Mori<\/a>. While Fascist architecture was intended to overwhelm \u201cthe\u00a0human scale, this building is very human, lightweight and luminous. In its own way, it subverts the idea of fascism. The architect\u2019s political affiliation broke under [the weight of] his talent.\u201d Today, Terragni\u2019s geometric structure houses the Italian financial police, the\u00a0Guardia di Finanza, and is considered a\u00a0jewel of postwar Italian architecture.<\/p>\n

3. Chandigarh (1950-mid-1960s) in India by\u00a0Le\u00a0Corbusier<\/p>\n

What began as an effort to build a capital city for Punjab after India attained independence in\u00a01947 became, according to Libeskind, \u201ca\u00a0relic of a colonial imagination.\u201d India\u2019s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, invited the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier to design civic buildings for a new, forward-looking urban hub. But the results were \u201cso odd and unrelated to the life of the people of Chandigarh,\u201d he adds, that it proved the limitations of importing an architect from an unrelated context. \u201cEven a great architect like Le Corbusier couldn\u2019t foresee his own failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Watts Towers (1954) in Los Angeles by\u00a0Simon\u00a0Rodia<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s allowed to make a building? And when does a work of art become a work of architecture? These questions play out in the story of the Watts Towers<\/a>, a series of 17\u00a0aerodynamic structures made from wire mesh and thin-shell concrete reinforced with steel and patched with tiles and pieces of colored glass \u2014 which the New York-based architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange, 53, refers to as an \u201carchitecturally scaled outsider-art project.\u201d Having survived a proposed demolition in 1959 and the uprising in\u00a0the Watts neighborhood in 1965, the towers became a National Historic Monument in 1990.<\/p>\n

5. Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium (1964) in Takamatsu, Japan, by Kenzo Tange<\/p>\n

via Former Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium Rebirth Committee<\/p>\n

What should be done with once-beloved buildings that have fallen out of favor with those in power? Tange\u2019s gymnasium, which\u00a0Mori describes as \u201ca masterpiece\u201d of Japanese postwar design, offers a case study. \u201cIt never achieved historic status, because it\u2019s\u00a0not old enough to qualify,\u201d she notes. The\u00a0government sought to demolish the building, which has been closed since 2014, after it was declared unsafe. Although a privately funded committee proposed refurbishing it last year and a lawsuit was recently filed to block its destruction, its fate remains uncertain.<\/p>\n

6. Boston City Hall (1969) by Michael McKinnell, Gerhard Kallmann and Edward\u00a0Knowles<\/p>\n

One of America\u2019s most famous examples of\u00a0Brutalism, Boston City Hall \u201cis often cited as\u00a0the country\u2019s ugliest building,\u201d Lange says. Imposing and blocky, it was one of a wave of\u00a0Brutalist municipal buildings erected in the United States in the 1960s that \u201cmade people feel like, \u2018Does the government hate me?\u2019\u201d Over time, some came around to its monolithic grandeur, and it became a city landmark in\u00a02025. But, Lange admits, \u201cthere\u00a0are those who are never going to like\u00a0Brutalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

7. Gehry House (1978) in Santa Monica, Calif., by\u00a0Frank Gehry<\/p>\n

In the late 1970s, Gehry renovated his house<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and rankled his neighbors in the process. With\u00a0a budget of $50,000, he wrapped a\u00a0classic-looking bungalow with chain-link fencing, plywood and cinder blocks, using \u201call these cheap construction materials in a\u00a0totally different way, blowing it out and blowing it up,\u201d\u00a0says Lange. The home, according to Lange, became an icon of the\u00a0architectural style known as\u00a0Deconstructivism, which focused on breaking conventional forms. \u201cAt\u00a0the\u00a0time, it was seen as\u00a0aggressive.\u201d<\/p>\n

8. Elbphilharmonie (2017) in Hamburg, Germany, by\u00a0Jacques Herzog and\u00a0Pierre\u00a0de\u00a0Meuron<\/p>\n

Courtesy of Herzog & De Meuron. Photo: Iwan Baan<\/p>\n

The swooping concert halls built on top of an existing brick warehouse reflect \u201chow controversy ages over time,\u201d Mori says. The project was the subject of fierce debate during its protracted construction. First scheduled for completion in\u00a02010, with a budget of just over $300 million, it ended up costing nearly $1 billion by\u00a0the time it finally opened in 2017. Once it\u00a0was finished, \u201cthe public perception completely changed. Everyone loves it.\u00a0You can\u2019t get tickets.\u201d<\/p>\n

9. The White House Ballroom (2025-present) in Washington by\u00a0Shalom Baranes<\/p>\n

Jacquelyn Martin\/AP Images<\/p>\n

Well before its scheduled completion in\u00a02028, the White House Ballroom<\/a> has become a flashpoint in debates over U.S. presidential authority, historic preservation and the conservative push to return to Greek and Roman design principles. The Trump administration demolished the East Wing to make room for\u00a0the new building, which Libeskind says will \u201cdwarf\u201d the rest of the White House. (In\u00a0response to such speculation, President Trump, who wrote on social media that the ballroom would be \u201cThe Greatest of its kind ever built!,\u201d has said that the new structure won\u2019t be taller than the Executive Mansion of\u00a0the White House.) \u201cIt will be controversial for a long time because it\u2019ll change the appearance of the White House as the house of the people,\u201d Libeskind says.<\/p>\n

These interviews have been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n

More in Architecture and Design See the rest of the issue<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How to Be Cultured Menu Architecture and Design 1. The Mythical Tower of Babel (10-7 B.C.) Heritage Images\/Hulton…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[158737,357,76,354,355,49,48,230319,4219,8090,356,75,157650,230151,230323,230324,58091,230321,130491,230322,230263,230320,145465],"class_list":{"0":"post-611460","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-alexandra","9":"tag-architecture","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-ca","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-chandigarh-india","16":"tag-daniel","17":"tag-dc","18":"tag-design","19":"tag-entertainment","20":"tag-frank","21":"tag-gehry","22":"tag-kenzo","23":"tag-lange","24":"tag-le-corbusier","25":"tag-libeskind","26":"tag-mori","27":"tag-tange","28":"tag-tculture2026","29":"tag-toshiko","30":"tag-white-house-building-washington"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}