Howard Raggatt's words

The great tradition of architecture is that the first one probably wasn't all that good, and the second one probably wasn't all that good either, but you know, by the time you got to the fiftieth Gothic cathedral, they were really doing some good work. So, really the idea of the copy in architecture is much more pervasive than the original is, and yet avant gardeism I suppose, or modernism, seems to have always focussed on this... the 'one off'

It's quite often the case that things appear ugly, that is, we're unused to them, or they're a bit different to our expectations or something like that at a particular time. Just a few years later, they may well be seen as beautiful in other words, our eye is constantly shifting