Wonders & blunders

My favourite recent building is Santiago Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. But my all-time favourite has to be Donato Bramante's Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, built in Rome in 1502. The word bramante means "ravenous", a fitting nickname for a man whose gargantuan ambitions led him to design the new basilica of St Peter's a few years later. But in this bijou temple, Bramante worked on an uncharacteristically intimate scale, producing a domed and colonnaded structure only 15 feet in diameter but geometrically perfect. If, as Goethe said, architecture is frozen music, then the elegant Tempietto is a short and sweet Italian madrigal.

My least favourite building is the United Nations Secretariat in New York – a stain on Le Corbusier's otherwise majestic CV. It is shaped like a box of breakfast cereal, and although it may have looked innovative in 1950, the style does not date well – unlike the glorious Art Deco skyscrapers standing nearby. It must be tragic to have one of the offices in the windowless north or south ends, where some of the best views in the world are forever blocked by slabs of marble. New Yorkers and UN bureaucrats alike must thank heaven its planned twin never got off Le Corbusier's drawing board.