One of America’s ugliest buildings will soon be named after former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
The San Francisco Federal Building, a 70-meter-tall, 18-story structure located in the city’s South of Market neighborhood, will next week be unveiled at an official ceremony as the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building.
Bay News reports:
Opened in 2007, the building houses offices for Pelosi along with the Social Security Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Transportation.
Pelosi has represented California’s 11th Congressional District for 37 years. In 2007, she was elected the first woman to serve as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The U.S. General Services Administration, the building’s landlord, describes the structure as an architectural landmark in San Francisco.
“The building’s shape and orientation maximize natural airflow for cooling and ventilation and take advantage of natural daylight for the majority of office interiors,” according to the GSA.
The honor bestowed to Pelosi is presumably an award for the nearly three decades she has represented the city of San Francisco in Congress, including two four-year stints as Speaker of the House.
However, the structure has long been ridiculed as an architectural monstrosity, including by Pelosi’s political nemesis Donald Trump.
In fact, Trump even issued an executive order back in 2020 which singled out the building as one of the ugliest in the whole of San Francisco.
The decree, titled “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” sought to promote classic architecture rather than the modern designs that so many people dislike.
“[The General Services Administration] selected an architect to design the San Francisco Federal Building who describes his designs as ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ architecture, intended primarily for architects to appreciate,” the executive order reads.
“While elite architects praised the resulting building, many San Franciscans consider it one of the ugliest structures in their city,” it continued.
The executive order was rescinded soon after the Biden regime took office. It remains to be seen what Trump has in store for promoting architectural beauty in his second administration.
Ben Kew is a writer and editor. Originally from the UK, he moved to the U.S. to cover Congress for Breitbart News and has since gone on to editorial roles at Human Events, Townhall Media, and Americano Media. He has also written for The Epoch Times, The Western Journal, and The Spectator.
You can email Ben Kew here, and read more of Ben Kew’s articles here.
