ABSTRACT
The San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Morphosis with Smith Group Architects and completed in 2007, likely heralds a new age in public buildings in the United States at a time when the concept of "public building" needs a reboot. The low fortunes of the concept of the public are a sad spectacle, but they do provide an opportunity for architecture to have some significant revitalizing effect. Recognizing the force of neoliberal economics on the production of public space, and largely unimpressed with the marginal improvements made possible by pro bono work, a new unsentimental pragmatic attitude toward the public good has asserted itself in the architectural academy. The bourgeois public occupies a different rhetorical space from the ancient polis. Whereas the discussants among the members of the polis understood themselves to be preparing for a decision by the very same people doing the discussing, a modern public is self-consciously extrapolitical.
