Building Design magazine last week awarded 20 Fenchurch Street – the Walkie Talkie building – its “Carbuncle Cup”.

Jonathan Jones, Guardian art critic

There are two terrible differences between architecture and other art forms – permanence and prominence. No one is making us read books we don’t like and even the lousiest art exhibition soon ends, but the ludicrous warped ostentation of the Walkie Talkie is not going anywhere, no matter how many prizes for bad architecture it wins, nor can anyone in or near the City of London avoid its manic parody of modernity.

It’s time to reject this fatalistic sense that grandiose design mistakes are irreversible – that we just have to put up with them. I seriously think this building should be done away with. The reason is not just that it is silly in itself, bulging on the skyline like a model that has somehow wandered out of the 1960s TV show Thunderbirds, but even more urgently to shock developers into some sense of humility. For the Walkie Talkie, let’s face it, is just the most risible of the plague of big, bad buildings eating up the capital’s sky.

London is being wrecked by outrageous crimes against architectural taste. Walking around the City, it really seems there is a competition to put up the most cynically flashy, vacuously ahistorical and insensitive eyesores. A corporate dystopia is being built before our eyes. This rush towards a chilly fake avant garde future seems unstoppable. What can anyone do, apart from moan or award the Carbuncle Cup? This is what we can do: demolish this deranged building to create a firebreak that ends the inferno of towers.

Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum

Nobody – not even, so I have reliably been told, its designer, Rafael Viñoly – is happy with the way that 20 Fenchurch Street has turned out. Nobody except maybe for Peter Rees, for two decades the City of London corporation official who presided over the firestorm of high rises that has swept over the City of London with apparent glee. Standing outside the Design Museum, you used to get the most spectacular view of Tower Bridge and the river. Now the sky you used to see framed by the bridge is blocked by Viñoly’s work, the wrong building in the wrong place.

But much as I would wish this unappetising lump gone, dynamiting it, or, more likely dismantling it piece by piece over a couple of years, is not a great idea. We demolish far too many buildings, too quickly. It is enormously wasteful, and it creates the idea that there are quick fix answers to tough problems.

When Glasgow’s once utopian high rises filled up with refugees and hard cases, the instant solution was to move them out, blow the buildings up, and start again, as if it were architects alone who were responsible for all that had gone wrong. Lousy wages, alcohol and war in the Middle East has got a lot more to do with it than Le Corbusier’s doctrines. There are places in Britain that have gone through the cycle of demolish and rebuild three times in the course of a lifetime.

You suggest that architecture leaves the public without a choice; they simply can’t ignore it. I am sure that you of all people aren’t suggesting that all new buildings should be as inoffensive as possible for fear of upsetting people?

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