I had to spend 3 months working in FP... and as you might expect, it was absolutely awful. The building is just as depressing on the inside as it is on the outside. The florescent lighting has a weird greenish tent to match the slightly greenish carpet and greenish walls. It was like working in a giant mold spore.

Uh, it's a Modernist building. More specifically, Brutalist. There are lots of them in cities. Like New York, Chicago, L.A., Paris, London, Moscow. I don't want to blow up buildings just because I don't like the design. Plus, it can house a lot of people in a small area, you know, like in cities. Urban cities.

Amateur San Francisco architecture critics bore me.

Urban cites with sparkling conversation, old universities, richly textured pasts, bon mots -- I hear you.

"Uh," but I don't think anyone want to see it explode. That would be messy. And loud. But its color seems to be the problem.

Obviously, nobody expects informed journalism on SFist but what is your point here?

There's really nothing phenomenal about the picture, first of all. It's not difficult to find a handful of similar perspectives. "...almost aesthetically pleasing...?" Again, not really. There are actually pictures out there of this building that do render it in a pleasing way, as opposed to a shot like this that, through cropping, etc., emphasizes density through repetition (the building does end you know. It doesn't repeat infinitely in both directions) and is framed so as to cause a groundless, horizon-less disorientation. Of course, that's what the photographer wants to say. That this is a horrible, monolithic blight that blots out the sun and swallows the impoverished little children that live inside it. Got it.

It's actually just a building. It's not evil. The fact that it currently inspires such ire in some people is laughable. It's also a sign of the current (uninformed) fascination with architectural faux-criticism in this city. This trend will pass and I look forward to that. As for Fox Plaza, some people think it's ugly. Some people don't.

More important than it's ugliness, or lack thereof, is the fact that it houses hundreds of people. This is what matters. As to your offensive remarks about the people that live here, I can only share with you my experiences. I'm a working professional. My neighbors all seem to be sane, friendly, clean people as well.

Some are students. Some are seniors. Most seem to be somewhere in between, like myself. In fact, they're San Franciscans! They look a lot like the neighbors I had in the Castro. They're also similar to my previous neighbors in North Beach. Come to think of it, they display a diversity also not dissimilar to my old neighbors in the (gentrified) Mission. My point is that we're just a bunch of the same people that live anywhere else in the city. Of course, this is probably what any rationally thinking person would have imagined, right? I assume it obvious.

And as for why one would decide to live here:

The location is fantastically convenient.
Transit access is great.
It's pet friendly.
There are 8 or 9 Zipcars in the garage downstairs
My apt. has new floors and new appliances.
And from my apartment I can see in panoramic glory:

Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Union Square, Financial District, Ferry Building, most of the Bay itself, the Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena Island, Soma, Potrero Hill, the Mission, the Castro, Twin Peaks. I can also see Oakland, Mt. Diablo, and even Foster City.

"Or so we've heard. Total rumor, you know. Don't believe it."
Or you're just making things up because you're bored, I guess.

Yes, the Fox Theater was beautiful. Is it that hard to like different types of things? Like Baroque, Modern, Minimalist, experimental, traditional, etc? Yes, the 60's screwed up San Francisco. But tearing down a freeway (THAT WAS DAMAGED BY AN EARTHQUAKE, MIND YOU) is a lot different than tearing down a building that contributes to urban density and helps give a neighborhood character (just trust me on that one--there are over 400 units in Fox Plaza--with people--like you and me!)

Now quit talking about Fox Plaza and save the Alexandria--oh wait, you were probably too busy complaining about the de Young while it was being sold.

This building isn't nearly as bad as you claim. The units I've seen in here were fine, if not similar to your typical boring condo. The units on the upper floors have really great views, but the downside is that walls are pretty thin, I could hear anyone walking by in the hallway.

This tower was the reason there are now restrictions on tall buildings in the city. I don't know if you've noticed, but it is really windy in that area, you can thank the builders of Fox Plaza, who didn't factor in the wind tunnel this structure would create.

Finally, the post office at this site is slated to be demolished and become tower two: yes, decades later, the Fox Plaza building will be expanded, hopefully with some lessons learned built into the new tower.

It's an awful building in so many different ways, from its wind tunnel effect to its architectural brutality to the fact that it takes what seems like hours to catch an elevator to get up or down. I had a friend living there during a peirod when somebody was pulling the fire alarm with some frequency, and the walk twenty floors down the spooky old concrete stairways at 3AM was horrifying.

I liked the tenants, though, who have had to put up with a lot over the years, including the four-story crack house ACROSS the street from the Fox Plaza (get the story straight, people).

"This tower was the reason there are now restrictions on tall buildings in the city."

There are restrictions on tall buildings in the city? Hard to tell these days.

don't read this as trying to take away from anyone's photography, but the perspective and location don't do it for me the way the photo's implied namesake (michael wolf's architecture of density) does. weird building for sure, though.