A “hall of shame” listing of China’s top 10 “ugliest” buildings has kicked off with 87 bizarre designs in the running, including a violin-shaped church and an Inner Mongolia hotel in the form of a monstrous babushka doll.

Over the past 11 years a Chinese architecture website, archcy.com, has been inviting people to vote in the lighthearted annual contest that it hopes will encourage people to ponder the flexible notion of beauty.

For years, China has been an experimental ground for ambitious domestic and international architects, with mixed results. There is a national broadcaster building in Beijing, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, that is called “big pants” by Chinese social media users as it looks like a pair of legs. In an unfinished Hebei theme park, a quirky east-meets-west building features one half looking like China’s Temple of Heaven and the other like US Capitol Hill.

Among this year’s contenders is a “welcome to hell” glass bridge connecting two mountains in Sichuan that terrifies trekkers with two massive statues of people in traditional dress on the end of it, and a gigantic gate in a Yunnan park that mirrors the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The organiser of the competition said the purpose of the vote was to “provoke thinking about the beauty of and ugliness of architecture and promote architects’ social responsibility”. The website has partnered with some of China’s top architecture critics and firms.

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