what makes architecture ugly?

"Beauty is a french phonetic corruption of a short cloth neck ornament currently in
resurgence..."

Zappa

It's a loaded question worthy of halls of education.

Be that as it may, what is it that you find interesting about architecture? What attracts you to a certain building?

im in it for the chicks

definitely chicks...and good detailing.

in all seriousness, i like to defer to the Supreme Court..."can't really describe it, but I know it when i see it"

If perfection is really "the absence of (distracting) flaws" (my definition), can the definition of beauty be too far afield ?

mdler asks "what makes architecture ugly ?" If we can answer that, we'd have the definition of architectural beauty as a prescription, wouldn't we ?

I'd start with "irregularity of form and of detail; inconsistency; ill-considered proportion."

Whatever looks best after being covered in a thin layer of grime, covered in graffiti and lame band posters, encircled in litter and piles of trash and decorated with tiny like piles of yard chocolate all over its walkways.

Beauty is whatever you want it to be! Seriously. Of course, though, it's more detailed than that.

There's quite a bit of 'mediocrity' between 'ugly' and 'beauty', so it's not like it's a binary situation.

Beauty is more personal than a metric, I think, and relates to some kind of thing within you that forms a connection to the thing you experience. (Corbusier's 'sounding board' is kind of similar, except that he refers to the 'universal truth' or some such; this is more like the 'universal truth' within you). People who are in similar "headspaces" may appreciate a similar type of beauty in a similar way, and I think this is at least some of what studio is about (making sure everyone's "headspace" jives, at least a little).

So anyways, I went into science. The scientist in me avoids silly words like 'beauty' habitually, at least when describing form. It's much easier to talk about how the form works (performatively or spatially), or proportion, or whatever; you, other architects, the end user, etc. decide if it's beautiful. It doesn't mean 'beauty' is valueless so much as it means that 'beauty' is a highly variable value depending on the observer.