Ugliness and Judgment is a short and dense book that argues that the concept of architectural ugliness can be seen as an ingredient of a social conflict with institutional elements rather than as a matter of personal or shared aesthetic taste. In order to establish this argument, Timothy Hyde presents his hypothesis through a series of events in English architecture, because in England there is a continuous history, hundreds of years long, of civil and ecclesiastical courts arbitrating disputes in what would now be called town planning. Indeed, the power of the latter has strengthened in recent years, since the passing of the Ecclesiastical Exemption (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) (England) Order 1994 and successive legislation; such laws have not only affirmed the Church of England's right to make decisions on alterations to its “listed” (i.e., protected) buildings but also regulated this right in regard to other mainstream English Christian denominations. This backdrop provides a neat continuum for an argument that starts with the acts of individuals and makes it way up to the government-backed public inquiries of recent decades. The outstanding example of these is the case of James Stirling's “ugly” No. 1 Poultry, in the City of London, designed in 1985–88. An inquiry and subsequent appeals delayed the building's completion for ten years as the national amenity societies (voluntary organizations that advocate for the built and natural environment) joined forces with members of the public to challenge its erection on the site of protected Victorian office buildings, within a chamber set up with the furnishings and trappings of a regular courtroom.Hyde's story starts with the city of Bath before John Wood the Elder found it: a shameful mess of ugly buildings that failed to match up to the expectations of the genteel clients of the fashionable spas. In order to counter this, Wood needed to organize: to write, to draw, to lobby—what Hyde calls “the emerging formulations of civic aesthetics” (34). The resulting fine buildings (The Circus, Queen Square), along with the crescents and countless minor streets, are thus the embodiment of Wood's social construct. This took place in the early eighteenth century. In a later section of the book, Hyde tells the story of the irascible John Soane's battle with the London building authorities, and with his neighbors and all passersby, to extend the front of his house on Lincoln's Inn Fields in Holborn, in defiance of regulations, by 3 feet, 6 inches outward toward the street. Like much else to do with Soane, this ended up in court. As Hyde explains, an attack on a professional's artistic decision was then seen as a libel against his person; thus, a personal transgression by one side or the other made its way into a legal formulation within the civic sphere.The Soane case took place in the early nineteenth century. Shortly afterward, a committee of experts discussed the use of a suitable pollution-resistant stone for the Houses of Parliament, and then later another made suggestions for that stone's replacement when the original material failed. In this way, scientific decision-making structures entrenched themselves into arguments about civic beauty.Beyond Stirling's Poultry scheme, the last section of the book looks at three cases: the campaign by No. 1 Poultry's developer, Peter Palumbo, to insert a radical type of round altar into the clashing geometry of Christopher Wren's neighboring church of St Stephen Walbrook; the attack by Charles, Prince of Wales, on the 1983 proposal by the architectural firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek to extend the National Gallery; and the discourse around the 2009 proposals for new apartment blocks on the Chelsea Barracks site. In this last story Prince Charles was again at the center, a situation in which he found himself becoming a kind of social construct of public opinion, or even a conceptual version of monarchy resorting to its historic role of patronage. Over time, the media's dissemination of the arguments, whether in ever-expanding legislation or press coverage, was itself drawn into the process. For example, one aspect of the professionalization of today's amenity societies—from groups of connoisseurs into effective activists—has been the successful deployment of a range of social media to raise support for campaigns aimed at preventing damage to protected buildings. Thus, the entire building world eventually consists of a series of interlocking networks of constructed decision-making organizations.There is much to recommend this argument, not least its originality in regard to the concept of ugliness and the fact that with one exception (addressed below), Hyde's grasp of both the English context and the fine details of the events he describes are first-rate. But Hyde also raises, without mentioning it, an interesting question: Which is the ugly, and which is the beautiful? For if ugliness is a social and political construct rather than an aesthetic opinion, all of his stories could be reversed. The mess of the old city of Bath could be the beautiful, and Wood's additions could be the ugly. Certainly Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, seems to take this view; having been exiled to Bath, she sees the slow evolution of Tudor architecture (with its artisans' guilds and their rules) as presumably just as much a construct of beauty as the speculative developers' architecture. Was it the original austere, conventional Georgian front of Soane's house that was the beautiful thing, or was it his addition to it? The construct known as the planning system today would take the latter view.In some of Hyde's cases, such as that of the Royal College of Art's angry Anti-Uglies of the late 1950s—a group of, mostly, stained-glass students who campaigned loudly against recent quiet and refined buildings such as Albert Richardson's Bracken House, opened in 1959 opposite Saint Paul's Cathedral—there seems little doubt that what some people called “ugly” was what most others both then and now thought attractive, and vice versa. Indeed, Bracken House is protected today; Bowater House on Hyde Park, of which the Anti-Uglies approved, has been demolished.So “ugliness” is an odd choice of word; “civic disruption” might have been more appropriate. In fact, in some of Hyde's cases the “disruption” is actually “nondisruption.” This happened in Chelsea when Quinlan and Francis Terry aroused the ire of modernists in proposing a neoclassical housing estate alongside Wren's baroque hospital and their own earlier matching extension to it. The disruption here was that Richard Rogers had been displaced from the scheme through Prince Charles's interventions and had nothing to do with any aspect of the physical nature of the Terrys' design.Disruption, then, is what this book is mostly about. The only substantial element missing from Hyde's narrative is that of the battles of social class, the perennial desire of the British, recorded time and time again by the people and their observers, that arguments and prejudices about class should trump all logic. How else to explain the phenomenon of Alison and Peter Smithson, who throughout the 1950s presented their ideas for staggeringly ugly buildings as a kind of activism against the genteel complacency that reigned at the Architectural Association and elsewhere? While some of their fellow tutors saw their place at the school as an affirmation of a status quo that had enabled them to assimilate into it, regardless of class or background, the Smithsons were on the attack: housing was to look gritty, northern, and “working-class.” A thump on the nose would teach those southern softies a lesson.It is one of the great mysteries of British architectural history that this bizarre, disruptive, unaesthetic type of architecture has had the impact it has; only the perennial appeal of a good old-fashioned bout of class warfare can explain it. Louis Hellman, the veteran cartoonist of the weekly Architects' Journal, once depicted a bemused pair of working-class old-timers collaged against a particularly unfavorable view of the Greater London Council's recent Brutalist South Bank arts center: “We often come and admire the subtly articulated exposed concrete,” they observe, glumly. This message was intended as a commentary for the benefit of the average architectural practitioner on how elevated arguments about aesthetics operate at some remove from practice, a recurring theme in Hellman's work. Hyde's idea that the whole story of the design of this building, the responses to it, and its later history as a cult object for middle-aged enthusiasts of Brutalism is actually part of the history of the cultural and political construct of ugliness is, in fact, quite a convincing one.