When it comes to causes celebres, no one can hold a candle to the English. In their national character lies an inexhaustible reservoir of outrage, the likes of which passed out of the human spirit, as far as the rest of us are concerned, around the time of Carrie Nation and the Boer War. One of the recent issues about which it has pleased them to wax hot and bothered is an article by George Ferguson, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in which he advocates not the preservation of old buildings, as you might expect, but their principled annihilation.

The specific targets of his wrath are those putty-colored postwar monsters that go by the name of brutalism – though that label is far too dramatic to do justice to their drab paltriness. If you have ever been to London, especially to the South Bank or the intersection of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, you will have been properly appalled by these exercises in corduroy concrete, as I have heard it called. They mimic the overcast skies over the capital and catch within their grooves the soot of a half-century of exhaust fumes. Hell, Shelley reminds us, “is a city much like London.”

Mr. Ferguson’s article got me thinking about our own city’s architecture, and about which buildings I would be grateful never to see again. I suspect I may not have the right to ask for much, now that my most fervent prayer, that the New York Coliseum be reduced to rubble, was carried out before my very eyes. But I thought it might be a pleasant parlor game for design-conscious New Yorkers to consider which prominent buildings they would most like to abolish.

The majority of the buildings I would choose are of the postwar variety, contemporary with those that Mr. Ferguson has targeted. This is because, no matter how ill-favored a prewar building might be, it is almost certain to be enhanced rather than subverted by time’s fell hand. The accumulations of dust, the buffetings of wind, the subsidence of matter and its partial falling away all contribute to the embellishment of a Classical temple or a Gothic church.

But Modernist buildings, as though in punishment for their pretensions to timelessness, are the first in the history of architecture to receive no embellishment from the passage of years. If they change it is only for the worse, and once their moment has passed, the arid adequacy of their materials and their slavish obedience to geometry come to seem irredeemably graceless.

Of such buildings, there is such a wealth of choices in New York that I scarcely know where to begin. Let me say for starters that, aesthetically speaking, Pietro Belluschi’s Juilliard School has no compelling reason to exist. Never has travertine been so tastelessly abused as in this hulking mass that beetles over Broadway: It makes one yearn for – relatively speaking – the rococo refinement of those artillery turrets along the Berlin Wall. At least there is talk of revamping the place, according to the tentatively imaginative plans of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro.

Most buildings I would choose are far less prominent, though no less deleterious to their neighborhoods. One of the worst offenders is an ugly, towering Modernist block set back from 79th Street along Second Avenue. Known as the continental towers, it could more appropriately be called “The Yorktown slab.” A 30-story gray monolith, bristling with balconies, this 22-story building functions visually as a magnet that draws all things into the orbit of its ugliness, until they too become ugly by association.

While we’re at it, let’s not forget the Martin Luther King Jr. houses on Lenox Avenue and 114th Street. The problem with the red-brick towers-in-aparking-lot that make up this project is not their lack of distinction. Rather, it is that the city planners who designed them of the 1960s thought it would be a bright idea to place the buildings at irregular angles that rip a hole right through one of the noblest avenues in the city. There is talk these days about a second Harlem Renaissance, but as long as these buildings remain in place, something will be lacking on Lenox Avenue.

As regards avenues, occasionally you see old photographs that look south down Park. Rising over the avenue is what we now call the Helmsley Building, a fussily endearing piece of late 1920s classicism. Once it performed a useful function, providing an almost Parisian prospect, as well as a pause for the eye, which otherwise would have to continue unimpeded all the way down to Union Square. The Helmsley Building is still there, but it now stands in front of the Met Life (nee Pan Am) Building, looking ridiculously wee. Walter Gropius was an engineer, not an artist: There is no other way to explain the towering tactlessness of this ungainly two-tone example of the International Style. Park Avenue will never regain its vaunted glory as long as that building remains.

Allow me to point out, as a corollary to these somewhat intemperate observations, that an older gentleman in my acquaintance once boasted of how, back in the 1960s, he was walking down Park and, on seeing the then new Pan Am Building, wished death upon its creator. Lo, the very next day, Walter Gropius passed! Inspired by the man’s example, I recently tried my hand at that sort of thing – alas, with no conspicuous success. The ongoing good health of several of our more acclaimed architects is all the proof you need.