We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment.

UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions.

It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things.

Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu

Check 1, 2, 3, 4. This is 99% Invisible. I want you to give your name and where we are. I'm Roman Mars. My name is Henrik Bull.

Henrik Bull became president of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1968.

And we're having this conversation at the base of the Trans-American Pyramid.

Construction of the Trans-American Pyramid began in 1969. Looking up into infinity as the building comes to a point, 850 feet above us.

This is not the best view of the building.

In the beginning, Henrik Bull and the Trans-American Pyramid did not get along. In the San Francisco AIA opposed its construction.

Buildings should make sense. There's nothing about this building that makes sense. There's sort of a silly design, a dunce cap.

We thought that the Pyramid shape was just nothing but a let's call it advertising symbol.

The top third of it is just plain air. In the era of modern architecture building a couple of hundred feet of symbol.

It's just not considered proper or even moral.

In an article in late 2009, San Francisco Chronicle Urban Design writer John King summarized several of the contemporary criticisms of the Trans-American Pyramids proposed design.

Putting it in San Francisco would be no less reprehensible than destroying the Grand Canyon and inhuman creation, second-class world's fair space needle.

Venice and Leman John Burton said the Pyramid would rape the skyline.

It seemed to violate the whole purpose of zoning an urban planning.

The surrounding buildings were no more than three stories tall.

This was definitely not the vision of that neighborhood.

But over the course of 40 years, something happened.

Some people have never lost their hatred for the Trans-American Pyramid.

...