A note of cautious optimism hovered about the group of design professionals convened by the General Services Administration in San Francisco last month. These newly designated GSA peers would face the heady task of helping to select—or to challenge, urge, or encourage—their fellow practitioners through the GSA Design Excellence Program.

They met in the shadow of the program’s progenitor, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had earlier penned a simple set of guiding principles for federal design and construction that included a remarkable assertion: “The advice of distinguished architects ought to, as a rule, be sought prior to the award of important design contracts.” As elaborated through the subsequent leadership in the General Services Administration—through former commissioners Robert Peck and Joseph Morevic, GSA Chief Architect Ed Feiner, Director of Design Excellence Marilyn Farley, and carried forward by today’s Commissioner of Public Buildings Thomas Winstead and Director of Design Excellence and the Arts Thomas Grooms—the Design Excellence Program has literally turned our expectations of mediocrity in federal design on its head.