Wouter Van Acker is chargé de cours (Associate Professor) and Chair of Architectural Theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. Thomas Mical is Professor of Architectural Theory and Head of the School of Art and Design of Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. He is the author of Surrealism and Architecture (2004).

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsRetracing the Ugly and the Anti-aesthetic as a Productive Force in Postmodern ArchitectureWouter Van Acker, (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)1. Ugliness, the anti-aesthetic and appropriation: with some remarks on the architecture of ARM John Macarthur, (University of Queensland, Australia)2. On Ugliness (in Architecture)Bart Verschaffel, (Ghent University, Belgium)PART 1: UGLY AND MONSTROUS3. Instrumentalizing Ugliness: Parallels between High Victorian and Brutalist Architecture Timothy M. Rohan, (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA)4. Monstrous Becomings: A Minor CartographyHeidi Sohn, (TU Delft, the Netherlands)5. Faux Monumentality in Ricardo Bofill’s Les espaces d'AbraxasThomas Mical,(Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)6. Post-communism and the Monstrous: Skopje 2014 and Other Political TalesMirjana Lozanovska, (Deakin University, Australia)7. Here be MonstersAndrew Leach, (The University of Sydney, Australia)8. To Make MonstersCaroline O’Donnell, (Cornell University, USA)PART 2: UGLY AND ORDINARY9. ‘Ugly’: The Architecture of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott BrownDeborah Fausch10. Camp Ugliness: The Case of Charles W. MoorePatricia A. Morton, (University of California, Riverside, USA)11. Architecture in El Alto: the Politics of Excess Elisabetta Andreoli12. The Critical Kitsch of Alchimia and Memphis: Design by MediaAnnMarie Brennan, (University of Melbourne, Australia)13. The Immediacy of Urban Reality in Postwar Italy: Between Neorealism’s and Tendenza’s Instrumentalization of UglinessMarianna Charitonidou, (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)14. Ugliness as Aesthetic Friction: Renewing Architecture Against the GrainLara Schrijver, (University of Antwerp, Belgium)15. Ugliness, or the Cathectic Moment of Modulation between Terror and the Comic in Postmodern ArchitectureWouter Van Acker, (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)Index

A wonderfully rich and stimulating collection of essays, which plumbs the fraught nooks and crannies of the ugly’s discursive terrain. Taken together, the detailed case studies build a satisfyingly variegated account of the complex play of fascination and repulsion that attends aberrant form and architecture’s negotiations with it since the mid-twentieth century.