Some have compared it to a pile of broken paving stones. Others, to a rusty spaceship crash-landed on the edge of the city. The architect of Paris’s new Philharmonie concert hall, Jean Nouvel, promised that it would be “one of the most remarkable symphonic buildings existing.” Remarkable indeed, for its escalating budgets, endless delays and bitter rows, which climaxed this week when Nouvel boycotted the inauguration of his own building, accusing his client of “contempt for architecture, for the profession and for the architect of the most important French cultural program of the new century.”

Running two years late and three times over its original budget, the €390m concert hall was still surrounded by an army of workmen frantically fixing cladding panels to the facade when the conductor took to his dais on Wednesday evening. But Nouvel was conspicuously absent. “The architecture is martyred, the details sabotaged,” he wrote in a blistering editorial in Le Monde that day, describing the finished result as a kind of architecture “that oscillates between counterfeiting and tampering”.

Looming above the Parc de la Villette in the east of the city like one of George Lucas’s menacing starships, the building certainly seems to embody the anguish it has caused both architect, client and taxpayer. It is a tyrannical hulk of a thing, its gargantuan grey shell wrenched to and fro as if battered by an intergalactic skirmish, sooty scorch marks burnt across its crumpled mass. It rises up in a series of tilted plates, clad with interlocking bird-shaped aluminium tiles, designed to draw visitors up from the park along zigzagging routes to the rooftop, where panoramic views can be had, with space for 700 people to picnic on its elevated plateau. Paris asked for a concert hall and it got a new mountain to boot, the result of an extraordinary tectonic rupture on the ring road.

There is the jagged prow borrowed from Daniel Libeskind, the billowing waves from Zaha Hadid, the chiselled zigzagging rooftop walk from Snøhetta, all tied together with the mishmash bricolage lunacy of Coop Himmelblau – whose contorted Confluence Museum just opened in Lyon, bearing a strong family resemblance to the Philharmonie. It is the kind of arms-length statement architecture that has been incubated in the anything-goes climes of China and the Middle East for the past few years; but it is a shock to the system to see it land in a European capital, on quite such a scale. The result is a greatest-hits mash-up of dictators’ icons, a building that blends the excesses of “starchitectural” culture into one over-seasoned potage.1

• 1. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jan/15/philharmonie-de-paris-jean-nouvels-390m-spaceship-crash-lands-in-france