Public buildings should be inherently part of our urban life as it provides essential sociocultural activities that activates a community to come together and thrive. Unfortunately, a hypocrisy exists within it’s structure as governmental services tend to exist in a labyrinth of isolated offices which house a system of bureaucratic functions. The restricted movement, lack of transparency, and a general deficiency of public functions in these buildings result in the community not connecting or identifying with them.

In order to reverse this trend, the design of public buildings first priority should be placemaking. The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1958) argues that the goal of architecture should be primarily to create human experience, instead of just designing a purely functional building. Then a designed object transcends its functional purpose, it can be said it has a “soul.”