Which is the fairest of them all?

Is the Dakota apartment building, on Central Park West in New York, "the ugliest building in America"?

That was the judgment of cultural host Alastair Cooke, in one of his television commentaries.

Was John Lennon in love with ugly? Is that why he lived (and died) at the Dakota?

Film director Roman Polanski must have thought the Dakota was ugly, or at least scary, when he made it the setting for his classic devil-worship film, "Rosemary's Baby."

When it comes to architecture, taste is unpredictable. Surprise: The Dakota has just been ranked as the 87th most beautiful building in American history. That's not exactly Top 10, but Top 100 isn't bad, either.

The ranking comes from a poll taken by the American Institute of Architects. In honor of the AIA's 150th anniversary, the organization asked pollster Harris Interactive to survey a typical cross section of Americans to determine the 150 best-loved US buildings.

You think northern New England's a hotbed of classy architecture? Best to think again. Out of the 150, our region scored just nine entries. The top showing is Trinity Church in Copley Square (by H. H. Richardson, 1877), at number 25 in the poll.

Our other local champs:

No. 43: Crane Memorial Library in Quincy (by Richardson, 1882) .

No. 58: Ames Library in North Easton (Richardson again, 1879).

No. 64: Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston (Alexander Parris , 1826, renovated by Benjamin Thompson, 1978).

No. 77: Sever Hall in Harvard Yard (Richardson yet again, 1880).

No. 80: Phillips Exeter library in New Hampshire (Louis Kahn, 1972).

No. 90: Boston Public Library in Copley Square (Charles McKim, 1895).

No. 113: Fenway Park (Osborn Engineering, 1912, many times renovated).

No. 142: The Hancock Tower, mislabeled as the "John Hancock Hotel and Conference Center" (Henry Cobb of I. M. Pei, 1976).

Four out of nine for architect Richardson? Maybe that will help the effort to save the great Victorian's home in Brookline, which (as we've noted here) is threatened with demolition.

You have to take polls like this with a grain of salt. What Harris did was show each person a single photograph of each of 247 buildings. The 247 were pre-selected by a group of architects.

There is, obviously, something wrong with this procedure. Far too much depends on the quality of the photograph. It's no surprise that the Empire State Building led the poll at No. 1, not when you look at the lovely photo, which shows the building dramatically silhouetted against the city and the sky.

The AIA poll reduces a work of architecture to a visual image, like the simple flat icon on a computer screen. We live in an era dominated by the media, where our other senses are overwhelmed by the visual. But a work of architecture needs to be experienced in many other ways.

You can smell it and you can hear it (imagine walking into an old church, the suddenly cooler, damper air, the smell of candles and stone, the echoing sound). It must be experienced not only as an object, but as a set of indoor spaces. You need to feel how those spaces unfold as you move through them, see how the light comes in, ask yourself how well the building supports its functions. You need to notice how it relates to the buildings or the landscape around it, because buildings don't arrive alone. Especially in cities, each is a member of a community of buildings, which interact to create a public world between and among them.

Still, polls like this remain instructive. It's hard to ignore the fact that so many of the most admired modernist architects are missing. There's nothing by Mies van der Rohe -- not the Seagram tower in New York, nor the Farnsworth House near Plano, Ill., nor Crown Hall in Chicago.

Nothing by Alvar Aalto, either, despite his superb Baker House at MIT and Mt. Angel Abbey library in Oregon. Le Corbusier's only American building, the Carpenter Center at Harvard, doesn't make it. The most marvelous new building I've seen lately, the all-glass Apple store on Fifth Avenue by Peter Bohlin (of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson), rings in at only No. 53.

One of the greats who does score, though, is Frank Lloyd Wright, whose name is the most frequent on the list with seven entries. But his top slot is only No. 29, for the astonishing house Fallingwater, perched atop a waterfall in Mill Run, Pa.

Americans are old-fashioned people when it comes to architecture (compared, say, to Western Europeans or East Asians), and this is an old-fashioned list. Only two recent works make the top 20. It's great to see Maya Lin's masterpiece Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) here at No. 10. It's a little more disconcerting, though, to realize that the only other recent work is the World Trade Center at No. 19. The WTC, much as we may feel its loss, was bad architecture and bad urbanism.

You can find the whole list, complete with photos, at the AIA's web site (www .aia150.org). Instead of commenting on it further, I'm feeling I should probably stick my neck out and name some favorites of my own. Here is Campbell's list of a round dozen great American buildings, in no special order. I'm not saying I might not choose a different list on a different day. A lot of these are quite small: It's easier to achieve perfection on a small scale.

The University of Virginia campus, by Thomas Jefferson.

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, by Louis Kahn.

The Christian Science Church in Berkeley, Calif. , by Bernard Maybeck.

The American Radiator tower on 40th Street in New York, by Raymond Hood.

Taliesin East , the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, in rural Wisconsin.

The Coonley House outside Chicago, by Wright.

The Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine, Wis. , by Wright.

Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pa., by Wright.

The Ames Gate Lodge in North Easton , by Richardson.

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, by Henry Bacon, sculpture by Daniel Chester French.

The Gamble House in Pasadena, Calif., by the brothers Greene and Greene.

Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs , Ark. , by Fay Jones.

Only five of my dozen make the AIA's list of 150. As we said at the beginning, taste in architecture is unpredictable.

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.