Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s not even about what ugliness is, or why our understanding of what it is see-saws so violently. We don’t learn why people once loathed John Nash’s All Souls at Langham Place, one MP calling it ‘a horrible object’, or what insanity led Edwin Lutyens to condemn — as ‘an ugly angle’ — roofs slanted at 45 degrees.