Wonders & blunders

30 Finsbury Square by Eric Parry Architects has instantly become a contemporary classic. It's a serene addition to the cityscape, quietly appealing to the eye, with its subtle asymmetrical composition of piers, and to the intelligence with its brilliant flexibility of the interior space allowed by the load-bearing Portland stone facade. A new take on a Medici banker's palazzo, perhaps? At night, the interior lighting scheme reinterprets the stone facade as a beautifully modulated pierced screen. Like all the best buildings, this one raises the spirits and offers something new each time you see it.

Poole Meadow bus station in Coventry, built circa 1990, is a parody of classicism and post-modernism. It really is trash architecture which should be demolished immediately: it's crass, ugly and uses very unpleasant materials. There really is no excuse, and never has been, for this kind of urban detritus. Originally commissioned by Centro, the passenger transport executive for the West Midlands, it is now on the edge of the Phoenix initiative regeneration project by MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, with its exciting range of integrated artists' commissions. Poole Meadow bus station really cannot hide any longer.