Why Is Everything So Ugly?

In an essay titled "Why Is Everything So Ugly?" published in n+1's Winter 2023 issue, the magazine's editors explored a wide range of unattractive, unseemly, and visually depressing phenomena across the contemporary built environment, with journeys into ugly architecture, ugly product design, ugly films, and ugly lighting. The purpose was not to be denunciatory, but rather to taxonomize, to interrogate, and above all to notice.

The essay became one of n+1's most-read pieces ever, and garnered numerous letters to the editor from defenders and critics of ugliness alike. To deepen and continue the conversation, the essay's authors—n+1 co-editors Lisa Borst and Mark Krotov—will join architectural historian and editor Mariana Mogilevich, film editor and writer Blair McClendon, and painter and critic Dushko Petrovich Córdova and endeavor to theorize contemporary ugliness in architecture and beyond. How can we think about ugliness without falling into reactionary moralism? How can we assess the built environment with humor and irony? How can we think about urbanism in ways that both allow for density and also resist totalizing, well, ugliness?

About the panelists

Mariana Mogilevich is editor in chief of Urban Omnibus, the Architectural League of New York's publication dedicated to observing, understanding, and shaping the city. A historian of architecture and urbanism, her research focuses on the design and politics of the public realm. Her book, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) received the JB Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Dushko Petrovich Córdova works across media as an artist, critic, publisher, and educator. He is a co-founder of Paper Monument, which has published numerous critically acclaimed books, including
, among many others. Petrovich currently serves as professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he previously chaired the New Arts Journalism department and directed the Low-Residency MFA program. 

Blair McClendon is an editor, filmmaker, and writer. His film work has screened at Sundance, Cannes, Tribeca, TIFF, and other festivals around the world. His writing has been published in n+1, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.