It has been exciting to watch this building go up on Mission Street over the last few years, and now the building is ready, and ready for an appraisal by the Times. The architect Thom Mayne has had a great run of big, important buildings. He's responsible for the (apparently) great new Caltrans building in Los Angeles, which has a clever neon gimmick that suggests car taillights in motion..
It’s a good time to be Thom Mayne. A founder of the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis, he has evolved from brash outsider into one of the country’s most celebrated architects in less than a decade by infusing his industrial-machine aesthetic with a slyly idiosyncratic sensibility. And he pulled that off while taking on an improbable mix of clients, including public school administrators and government bureaucrats.
His recently completed Federal Building in San Francisco is his most powerful government work to date, its slender form and perforated metal skin a clever play on notions of transparency in an era when the fear of terrorist attacks is prompting government agencies and corporations to turn their offices into armored compounds.
The building may one day be remembered as the crowning achievement of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence program, founded more than a decade ago to remedy the atrocious architecture routinely commissioned for government offices. Under the leadership of Edward A. Feiner, the agency’s former chief architect, it has pushed through some of the most important civic buildings since the New Deal, including a stellar courthouse designed by Richard Meier in Islip, N.Y., and Mr. Mayne’s new federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore.
More Openness in Government (Offices, That Is) - The New York Times
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