4. Guggenheim Museum (Museum of Modern Art)

New York, United States

"Toilet", "hangar flying saucers" - so at the time described the revolutionary project of the Museum of Modern Art, proposed in 1943 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The museum was created by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on the basis of a collection of contemporary art. Wright had never engaged in designing museums, and worked outside of New York, so this project was for him a double debut. Wright did not like New York, concrete jungle called him.

The project of the museum he created under the influence of abstract art, in particular paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, from the collection of the Guggenheim, it is not surprising that the building looks like an inverted pyramid-shaped tower. Because of this unusual architectural solutions museum received a series of unpleasant nicknames - "inverted pot child", "a giant snail shell." The latter is not without foundation, as Wright does simulated spiral bending shell. The building was supposed to start in 1946, but was postponed because of the protests of local residents, and began only in 1956. The Guggenheim did not live to see this - he died in 1949, and the construction of a fully guided Wright.

New York media relentlessly ridiculed building under construction, calling it a "marshmallow", "corkscrew", "inverted washing machine." Journalist Brendan Gill wrote: "It is a stone freak who shocked everyone who passes by. He has nothing in common with their neighbors. " Another journalist wittily called the building of the Museum "Wright joke on gullible New York." However, when the museum was opened in October 1959, a few months after the death of Wright, in a souvenir shop had sold more cards with the image of a museum than postcards with reproductions of it stored in the works of art. Today, the Guggenheim Museum - one of the most visited museums in New York.

3. The Centre Georges Pompidou

Paris, France

"Stone King Kong" and "a manifold increase in the rear wall of the refrigerator" - that's the most harmless comparisons that were selected to describe the detractors of the National Center of Art and Culture Georges Pompidou. The center is built on the innovative projects of little-known architects, Englishman Richard Rogers and the Italian Renzo Piano, is fed to the architectural competition in 1971. The fact of the victory of the foreigners in the French competition for the construction of a national center of French art and culture in French society called the expected outrage. In one of the public events dedicated to the construction of the center, one woman is so actively expressed their outrage that it had to withdraw with the help of the police.

The situation is even more complicated, when it became known architectural features of the building of the future - all technical design (reinforcing connections, pipes, elevators and escalators) were located outside the .  Unusual seven-storey building in the high-tech style was to grow into the center of Paris, built-up old mansions, just a block from the oldest Parisian building, built in 1407 .  Rogers and Piano worked hard on the project until 1975 .  In 1974 died Georges Pompidou and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who succeeded him as president of the Republic, was determined to stop work on the project of his former political rival .  Especially that the higher the building, the more intensified protests .  Residents surrounding areas building committee accused of "disturbing public order", and creative elite resented ugliness design .  The situation was repeated with the Eiffel Tower .  At the opening of the Centre in 1977, the writer Anthony Burgess, author of "A Clockwork Orange", called it "a designer for 200 million dollars" .  However, the Pompidou Centre exhibition halls were never empty, and gradually accustomed to the French and love this colossus .  Reconstruction of the Centre in the late nineties has caused a new wave of criticism; This time the initiator was the architect Richard Rogers .  He was extremely pleased that the inner space has become more closed, and that visitors are now needed to buy a ticket for outdoor escalators .