Like reviewer "Darren O," I too am an unlucky occupant of Thom Mayne's Pritzker Prize winning San Francisco masterpiece. I can testify to the accuracy and truthfulness of everything in Darren O's review. Like the "giants" of modern and post-modern architecture who preceded him, Mr. Mayne's work displays complete contempt for the mere human beings who might come into contact with it. It embodies the authoritarian impulse and will to power that have underlain the modernist movement in architecture from the start. In fact, at the building's dedication ceremony in July 2007, Mr. Mayne was reported to have denounced Americans as fat, lazy, and under-exercised. He explained that his Federal Building had been intentionally designed to punish such people with elevators that don't stop on every floor, forcing all but the disabled to climb flights of stairs; and workplace components are located at vast lateral distances from one another, forcing one to walk great distances to see a colleague. (Most staff simply don't bother at all.) When Mr. Mayne was given a tour of the building's work spaces after the ceremony, he was reported to have started turning off lights and denouncing the workers for failing to use natural light only, as he had intended. (The light that is so overabundant on the south side, so wanting on the north.)
The poor quality of the engineering and of the workmanship and materials of the building also deserve mention. After three and a half years, the elevators are still far from reliable, the glass windows on the front of the building are still prone to cracking, and the polished granite floors are developing enormous cracks that have begun to resemble the nearby San Andreas Fault.
As an antidote to the anti-humanism of such "visionaries" as Mr. Mayne, one couldn't do better than to reread Tom Wolfe's small masterpiece cited in the headline, From Bauhaus to Our House. The only shortcoming of Tom Wolfe's book is that it was written in 1981. So many terrible buildings have been built since then!