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

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the center of San Francisco, there's a plaza with no benches.

It's central feature at the entrance of the plaza. It's a unique fountain that was designed by Lawrence Halprint in 1975.

The water shoots out at various angles from inside a sunken pit filled with large granite slabs.

It's a design that kind of pulls you in and invites you to take the steps down to the water and climb in between the hulking stones.

And that's part of the problem.

In 2004, radio producer Ben Tempton created a really fantastic documentary review in plaza called The Biography of 100,000 square feet

that first aired on a radio program I produced called Invisible Inc in May of 2004. The doc takes this really hard look at UN plaza when it was at its absolute worst.

And asks what I think is a really interesting question. Is there a point where good intentions and idealism of a certain design become so removed from reality that it actually borders on negligence?

All right, here's the show. I like to think my pal Ben Tempton for giving me the honor of premiering the piece back in 2004 and then letting me play it for you again more than seven years later as part of 99% Invisible.

Things have changed a bit since the stock was produced so stay tuned and I'll give you a short update on UN plaza after the piece. Here's Ben Tempton.

This is the biography of 100,000 square feet. At the heart of San Francisco, there is a crossroads where Market Street meets the Civic Center.

It is called United Nations Plaza or less formally your nation plaza. And for most of the past three decades, it has been San Francisco's most public theater of squalor, misery and sickness.

That place you in plaza was a madhouse. You could go there any hour of the day and see needles, liquor bottles, people fighting, people urinating and defecating and that fountain there, that that's unsanitary.

I've seen people shoot up at one end and go to the other end and die. I saw that. It's not Italy. People don't stroll down streets and sit and play bachou.

It's just not the mentality to use these big wide open plazas. It's never worked.

I worked in UN plaza for a summer, walked across the brick pavement through the wide view to San Francisco's imposing city hall.

Past the granite fountain, protected by a yellow plastic chain, through the thicket of the dull-eyed crack smokers and dealers who circled among the bronze stumps, all that's left to the benches since they cut them out with saws and removed them.

...