It's worth noting that my comments about the building are not just my opinion. Like I said, there's one floor which was recently remodeled. The windows there are waist-height to ceiling, wall to wall. Clean, well-maintained exposed piping on the ceiling allows most of the floor to be lit more brightly and breaks up the monotony. As for colors, there are more browns, yellows, wood patterns, and genuine wood. Some conference rooms even have wallpaper that looks kind of cool.
People who work on this floor are lucky compared to people on other floors and they know it. The window nearest the set of elevators on my side of the building has a styrofoam cup, and over it there's a notecard taped to the window right where people would come to bask in the sun on nice days. The notecard riffs on the old Mastercard ads, with prices for things like "quick peek" and "longing look", and the final line is "escapist fantasy... priceless!"
But here's the funny thing: there is money in the styrofoam cup, and I'm pretty sure it's not just a joke or aspirational seed money. So clearly, a lot of people share my opinion of the state of most of the building.
However, there are still at least two problems with the remodeled floor, both of which happen to be problems with the layout, that make it clear that it's still in the same building as the maze of twisting passages and designed under the same pressure, even if they don't actually have twisting passages up there.
The first problem is that the numbering scheme of offices, cubicles and conference rooms on the remodeled floor is... insane? Incomprehensible? Nonexistent? Well, I'm sure there's some logic to it, and I totally realize that the floors I'm familiar with could be confusing to some*, but the remodeled floor is a huge leap in confusion. I think even-numbered rooms might be on the opposite side of the building from the room with a number one higher or lower than them. When I want to go somewhere there I normally just pick a direction at random and walk until I find the room number I'm looking for.
And second, the middle section of it is blocked off. You need some kind of security clearance to get there. This is a problem because it's the middle of the floor. If you take the elevator there and happen to be on the wrong side of the building (and I never know about that until I get there because, like I said, incomprehensible numbering), you can't take the most direct route to where you need to be, you have to walk all the way around. They couldn't have blocked off one quarter of it to the side and left unimpeded traffic through the center of the building? No, apparently not.
So all in all, the remodeled floor would be rated much higher than the rest of the building by anyone who cares about interior design, but it still is never going to win any awards and still reveals the pressures that shape government buildings.
* I see people who probably don't work here much getting off the elevator near my office confused, probably because the only direction is badly designed. A floor plan is posted near the elevators closest to me, but it was designed from the point of view of the other end of the building, so there's a "you are here" sticker and there's an intuitive place to assume you are when you look at it and they are on opposite sides of the map. They should have either used a much bigger, more obvious sticker, or designed two different maps, one for each side of the building. It's symmetrical, so it's not like two maps would have been too hard.
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