For most of his career, Thom Mayne has been known as the architect whose work nearly everyone admired, but with whom almost no one wanted to work, due to his fiery temper and insistence on having his way in all matters of creative and artistic decision-making. And yet, Mayne has risen in recent years to become one of architecture’s most in-demand names, and even more surprisingly, he appears to be the go-to guy when a building needs to be designed for that most inflexible and creativity-stifling of all bureaucratic institutions, the U.S. government.