Washington Post named The Royal Ontario Museum's new addition (Michael Lee-Chin Crystal) the 'ugliest' building of the decade, December 28th, 2009. (QMI/Dave Abel, file)

TORONTO -- Ugly and useless.

That's how the Washington Post describes the Royal Ontario Museum's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal when listing it as the worst in the world of the decade's architecture.

In an article Sunday by the Post's culture critic Philip Kennicott, the ROM's $250 million crystal, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was dubbed the worst of the Aughts for surpassing "the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless."

"His aluminum-and-glass-clad crystalline forms grow out of the building's original 1914 structure, and from the street it's dramatic," Kennicott writes. "But go inside and you need a map to move around its irrational and baffling dead spaces.

"And where do you put art in a room of canted walls? Curators seem as baffled and frustrated by it as casual visitors."