100 Waterman Drive, South Portland

All over Europe are monuments to wealthy people's hubris, and to unpleasant discoveries of their limitations. They're called follies, and are often gloriously extravagant but unfinished, left standing for lack of money to complete or remove them. For one famous example, look at McCaig's Tower, a century-old incomplete replica of Rome's Colosseum perched high above the remote Scottish village of Oban. In Southern Maine, we have such a folly, just over the Casco Bay Bridge. It's at 100 Waterman Drive, where Beale Street Barbeque used to be. Approved in 2007, it was built by local developer Andrew Ingalls as high-end office space, with all sorts of green technology, local materials, and the works of progressive construction.

But all was not wine and roses. Before work began, there was a lengthy fight with neighbors who objected to its four-story design (three stories were, until then, the most allowed in the area under city zoning rules). Ingalls prevailed, convincing city leaders he needed the extra space to make the project profitable.

Completed in 2008, at the height of the real-estate collapse, the space has never been occupied. (It's impossible to wonder if one reason isn't that its big, tall windows maximize views of the local sewage-treatment plant directly across the road.)

Almost immediately after finishing the building, Ingalls tried to convince the South Portland City Council to buy the building to use as a new City Hall. Perhaps unsatisfied by his success at forcing his design down neighbors' throats in the name of making money, he quixotically decided to try to convince those same neighbors to buy the building and thereby ensure a windfall for himself. Councilors saw through the transparent ploy, and nixed it, as they did a second try in 2010, leaving what is truly a beautiful building in an unfortunate location to become a neighborhood laughingstock -- a lovely curiosity, which is just what a folly should be.