Depending on how you feel about Frank Gehry’s work, this building in progress could either be fascinating, monstrous or a combination of both. But it’s hard to argue with the fact that seeing the bones of such a complex structure is more interesting than the renderings of the finished building, which is another of the architect’s mirrored and faceted standouts. Inspired by the silhouettes of the mountain ranges of its southern France setting, ‘LUMA Arles’ will ultimately tower above an experimental contemporary art center.

Set on a former rail depot turned public park, the building is primarily sponsored by Swiss art collector Maja Hoffmann and is scheduled for completion in 2018. The working title for the tower is ‘Centre for Human Dignity and Ecological Justice,’ and it will host spaces for workshops, art studios, exhibitions, seminars and archives.

“We are creating a place where artists, thinkers, scientists – as well as doers and actors of the economic world – can gather and work together on new scripts for the world,” says Hoffmann of the project.

Photographer Victor Picon captured this series of images showing the intricate arrangements of metal ribs that will ultimately support the reflective cladding. Of course, Gehry’s a bit of a controversial figure in the architecture world, with some hailing his creations as visionary and others finding them garish and structurally unsound, noting that his Strata Center design at MIT has leaked, cracked and developed mold. What’s your stance on Gehry’s work?

Some buildings are so ugly, the only thing that could possibly improve them is a wrecking ball. It’s even worse when the structures are high-profile and expensive, making you wonder how many people who had to sign off at each stage of planning and construction actually thought to themselves, “Yes, this looks good.” Here are 15 examples of astonishingly ugly architecture that only a mother (or rather, the designers responsible) could love.

The Rock, Wellington International Airport, New Zealand

Perhaps this addition to the Wellington International Airport by Warren and Mahoney was designed to resemble a robotic cockroach in order to remind us of what will rise up and take our places on earth once we’ve succeeded in making ourselves extinct.

Renmin Ribao Building, Beijing, China

Beijing’s ‘penis building’ aka the headquarters of the communist People’s Daily newspaper has drawn wonder and incredulity from local residents, as well as worldwide notoriety. But the building will soon be sheathed, as the architect decided to give it a makeover after all the backlash. There’s probably a joke about state-sponsored journalism in there somewhere.

Frank Gehry’s Australian Blunder

“The building so ugly, it has to wear a paper bag” is Frank Gehry’s first project in Australia, inspired by a mashup of Sydney architecture and a treehouse. The curving structure was created using 320,000 custom-designed bricks.

ArcelorMittal Orbit Sculpture, London, England

Famed artist Anish Kapoor teamed up with engineer Cecil Balmond to create a sky-high tower in London that looks like a tangle of junk you pulled out of a drawer in your garage. The ArcelorMittal Orbit is a 376-foot-tall sculptural observation point overlooking the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

The Elephant Building, Bangkok, Thailand

Shaped like Thailand’s national animal, the Elephant Building in Bangkok is a 32-story mixed-use complex housing condos, offices and a language school.

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Ugly Architecture 15 Of The Worlds Most Hideous Buildings

Even the world’s most famous architects, from Zaha Hadid to Frank Gehry, get rejected sometimes. When Norman Foster’s visionary proposal for a new London airport built right in the middle of the Thames estuary was rejected, the architect retorted that the decision lacked “courage,” and that does often seem to be the case, with cities balking at overly ambitious and futuristic designs. But sometimes, it just comes down to money – or the architect’s ego.

Floating London Airport by Norman Foster

Land-poor London needs a new solution for an airport that can grow along with the city in the decades to come, but adding new runways would just be a short-term fix. Architect Norman Foster’s solution is to build a four-runway airport on the Isle of Grain in the Thames estuary, linking to existing and new high speed train networks. The proposal would use land that’s not currently suited for anything else, and would also make it easy to transport good directly to Britain’s other container ports. But the proposal isn’t among the three that London city officials are moving forward with, leading Foster to comment that the decision is “sadly predictable.”

Eisenhower Memorial by Frank Gehry

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial was deemed a bit too flashy by the former president’s family, leading to a series of re-designs before the architect’s proposal was finally scrapped. The Eisenhower family wanted a memorial that was “simple, sustainable, and affordable,” and while Gehry’s design seems uncharacteristically sedate compared to his usual work, it still included elements that the family and committee found to not be in keeping with Dwight Eisenhower’s humble character. Congressional budget cuts ultimately slashed the funds available to the project, and now it’s unlikely to break ground.

Kimball Art Center Extension by Bjarke Ingels

BIG is an appropriate acronym for the Bjarke Ingels Group, as the firm typically designs innovative, futuristic architectural solutions that are sometimes so far outside the box as to be a bit mind-boggling. Often described as a ‘wonder kid,’ young architect Bjarke Ingels seems to think on a large scale, dreaming up mountain-shaped residences with walkable green roofs and other unexpected designs. In the case of the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, one design after another has been rejected. The first, a twisting timber structure, got the axe for being out of character with the historic setting. The second, a large concrete volume that proved more popular with locals, was thrown out for failing to meet strict Old Town planning guidelines in the former mining town.

Neues Stadt-Casino by Zaha Hadid

Even Zaha Hadid, among the most celebrated of contemporary architects, has designs rejected every now and then. Hadid’s proposed design for the Neues Stadt-Casino for Basel, Switzerland won a competition four years ago, but Swiss tradition allows the public to have the final say on projects of this size that make use of public money. 62.5% of voters rejected the proposal, leading it to be scrapped.

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Rejected Starchitects 8 Controversial Building Concepts

Even the world’s most famous and celebrated architects have their failures, whether due to unforeseen consequences of an extraordinarily complex design or just plain shoddy construction. From the mold and cracks in Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater to downright dangerous flying roof panels at Calatrava’s opera house in Valencia, these structural defects have led to injuries, lawsuits and in some cases, potential razing of a project before it’s even opened to the public. You can’t quite call these buildings outright failures just because they’ve got structural issues, especially since some of them are already iconic. But is this what happens when architects neglect practical considerations in favor of bold aesthetics?

Mold and Structural Failures: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater

The masterpiece of perhaps the only architect who’s a household name in America, Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright was a fantasy home, a grand experiment that sought to push the boundaries of existing technology and building methods of the time. Cantilevered over a waterfall on Bear Run in rural Pennsylvania, the residence is undeniably stunning. Who wouldn’t want to live in a house perched right over the water, constantly filled with aquatic sounds and reflections? Anyone who’s ever dealt with mold. Fungal growth and excess humidity got so bad so quickly, owner Edgar Kaufmann nicknamed the house ‘Rising Mildew.’ And that’s just one of the major problems that began to plague the house almost immediately after it was built.

There were conflicts all along between Wright, Kaufmann and the contractors building the house and various elements were rebuilt several times. The cantilevers developed for the structure weren’t quite up to the task of holding it up, and the building started to deform before it was even complete in 1937. Two large cracks formed on the terrace’s parapet as soon as the formwork was removed. Wright insisted that the design didn’t require any kind of propping system, but by 1995, a deflection of 7″ was measured at the edge of the largest cantilever, along with a number of serious cracks. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which owned it by that point as a museum, had to do an extensive restoration and add steel trusses to support the cantilevers. Of course, these problems hardly put a dent in the importance of this house’s impact on 20th century architecture, or in Wright’s legacy.

Roof Falling Off: Calatrava’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia Opera House, Valencia, Spain

Santiago Calatrava is best known for sweeping, bird-like designs that seem like they could lift up off the ground and fly away. His Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia Opera House in his hometown of Valencia, Spain is a perfect example of his signature style, with 14 above-ground stories and three below-ground, all covered in a curved roof reminiscent of a helmet. The tallest opera house in the world at 246 feet, it contains four auditoriums. Right after it opened to the public in 2005, a series of problems began to plague the structure: the main stage platform in the largest hall collapsed, forcing the cancellation of performances. Then, the complex was inundated with 7 feet of floodwaters, destroying electronic equipment in the lower levels.

But in early 2014, the city of Valencia filed suit against Calatrava for a more serious issue: sections of the mosaic roof began to come off in high winds, forcing authorities to cancel performances and close the building to the public. And this is just one among many lawsuits and accidents relating to Calatrava’s structures. A conference center he designed in Oviedo suffered structural collapse, his footbridge to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao has required the city to pay out medical costs for dozens of pedestrians who slipped on the glass surface, and another footbridge over the Grand Canal in Venice has required ‘excessive repairs.’ Calatrava was also ordered to pay for the leaking roof of the Ysios Winery (pictured above.)

Leaking, Cracks and Falling Ice: Gehry’s Strata Center

This massive 720,000-square-foot academic complex for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is known as the Ray and Maria Stata Center after its two primary donors, and houses the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in addition to other academic departments and offices for thinkers like Noam Chomsky. It would be hard for anyone who knows the slightest thing about architecture to miss the fact that it’s a Frank Gehry design, with its sharp angles and melange of metallic finishes. Like most of Gehry’s work, the structure is both praised and reviled – you either love it or you hate it. Gehry himself says it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”

But MIT administrators have a less than glowing opinion of it for a different reason. The structure leaks, masonry has cracked, mold has developed, drainage has backed up and falling ice and debris repeatedly blocks emergency exits. MIT sued the architect in 2007, accusing him of negligence and breach of contract in the design of the center. Gehry’s response is that MIT is simply after his insurance money, stating “A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small. I think the issues are fairly minor.”

Falling Apart: Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera Center

Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera Center has been praised as the world’s most beautiful performing arts venue with a futuristic ‘twin boulder’ design on the edge of the Pearl River. Sharp angles, geometric patterns and stark white surfaces belie Hadid’s organic inspiration, taken from the geology and topography of the setting. Dotted with starry lighting, the main auditorium has a womb-like feel in gleaming gold. Unfortunately, just a single year after it opened to the public, the building was marred by falling glass and large cracks in the walls and ceilings, leading to serious leaks.

Like many of these ‘failures,’ the problem here isn’t so much Hadid’s design as it is the shoddy materials and construction techniques of the contractors that built it. Many of the 75,000 granite slabs that make up the exterior have begun to fall off, with some blaming poor quality craftsmanship and others blaming Guangzhou’s extraordinarily humid climate. But in China, deadlines to complete even the most complex buildings are often rushed, and a lot of architecture is built with the expectation that it will only stand for about 25 years. The construction group that built the opera center say that it was just extremely difficult to fulfill Hadid’s vision.

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Fallen Starchitects 7 Failures Of Famous Architects

How would the architectural styles of Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava translate to shoes? As these 6 collaborations prove, sometimes the results are just as you’d imagine, and sometimes they’re completely unexpected. These architect-designed and inspired shoes range from the practical and wearable to sculptural art objects.

Zaha Hadid for Melissa

Brazilian brand Melissa offered the ideal medium with which architect Zaha Hadid could indulge her creativity: moulded plastic, which makes it easy to create shapes that can’t really be achieved with more traditional shoemaking materials. Says Hadid, “The design engages with the ?uid organic contours of the body. The shoes asymmetric quality conveys an inherent sense of move-ment to the design, evoking continuous transformation. The concept addresses the perception of wearing the shoe in motion rather than a static display on a shopping window.”

Frank Gehry for J.M. Weston

Would you ever imagine that shoes designed by Frank Gehry would be so… conventional? The architect known for flashy, amorphous metallic structures designed these six-buttoned black-and-white leather boots for the 2009 collection of shoe company J.M. Weston.  “You shouldn’t have to differentiate between disciplines, shoes are very architectural and always have been, and even more recently there are new shoes… (that are) buildings.”

Zaha Hadid for Lacoste

Zaha Hadid designed a series of limited edition shoes available in quantities of just 1,000. According to Hadid, the shoes were designed “utilizing dynamic fluid grids, which when wrapped around the foot, expand and contract to negotiate the body ergonomically – creating a unique undulating and radiating landscape, ultimately translated to shoes in fine calf leather.”

Julian Hakes for Mojito

The Mojito shoe by architect Julian Hakes wraps around the foot in a continuous ribbon, and lacks the footplate that one might say is the most essential part of the shoe. As with most of these creations, however, Hakes’ design is more about form than function.

Rem D. Koolhaas for United Nude

The nephew of famed architect Rem Koolhaas, and an architect himself, Rem D. Koolhaas teamed up with British shoemaker Galahad Clark to create a line of architectural shoes for their brand United Nude. United Nude designs has also been inspired by other art forms, like furniture – they have a shoe that honors designers Charles and Ray Eames.

Santiago Calatrava-Inspired Shoes by Tea Petrovic

The architecture of Santiago Calatrava is captured flawlessly in a series of cutting-edge shoes by Tea Petrovic  for a project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. “I have created a shoe collection, as my graduating project, that is centered around the idea that each shoe is an sculptural-architectural structured form. To underline their sculptural form, the shoes are kept white, which on the other hand emphasis the artistic language, present in the entire collection.”