Back in 1964, a time when it was still possible for an American to be shocked by an ugly building, Norman Mailer began a piece for Esquire by murdering a hotel. The article was devoted to the Republican National Convention, which was held that year in San Francisco—a beautiful city that by the mid-sixties had become disfigured by “monstrous boxes of Kleenex ten, twenty, thirty stories high,” an unsightliness culminating in the new San Francisco Hilton, which “looked from the street to have the proportions and form of a cube of sugar.” Mailer went on:
The rooms were small, the rooms were very small for seventeen dollars a day, and the windows were placed to the extreme left or right of the wall and ran from ceiling to floor, in order to allow the building to appear to the outside eye like a radio being carried by a model who worked in the high nude. The carpets and wallpapers, the drapes and the table tops were plastic, the bathroom had the odor of burning insecticide. It developed that the plastic cement used to finish the tiling gave off this odor during the months it took to dry. Molecules were being tortured everywhere.