In 2003 Esquire called Ed Feiner the “most powerful architect in America.” Two years later, Robert Ivy wrote in RECORD that Feiner, as chief architect of the General Services Administration (GSA), had created “perhaps the most comprehensive and beneficial federal program for architecture since the New Deal.”

Feiner, who died of brain cancer on July 1 at age 75, ushered in an era of courthouses, federal office buildings, border stations and agency headquarters by Richard Meier, Antoine Predock, Cesar Pelli, Thom Mayne of Morphosis, Moshe Safdie, Laurinda Spear of Arquitectonica, Thomas Phifer, Andrea Leers and Jane Weinzapfel, Robert A.M. Stern, Bill Pedersen, Carol Ross Barney, Julie Snow, Ralph Johnson of Perkins + Will, Merhdad Yazdani of CannonDesign, Joan Goody, Hugh Hardy, Frances Halsband, Peter Bohlin, Craig Hartman of SOM, Laurie Hawkinson and Henry Smith-Miller, Harry Cobb and James Ingo Freed, among many other highly regarded architects. “He was this amazing character who nurtured so many of us,” Mayne told RECORD.