L.A. is due to receive a new federal courthouse. Now to ensure that the design process will give us a building of distinction.

Sometimes it is the scope of a vision that leaves you in awe. William Mulholland’s colossal effort to bring water to an arid San Fernando Valley. Robert Moses’ vision of a massive freeway system that would ease the congested metropolis of Manhattan. These are men who worked in broad strokes. At times, the quality of their work seems almost secondary.

Ed Feiner is such a crusader. Since 1990, as the chief architect of the federal government’s General Services Administration, Feiner has been the guiding force behind a $10-billion, decade-long plan to build or upgrade 155 federal courthouses across the country. In the process, Feiner has sought to bring back to federal courthouses the grandeur that was lost during the 1960s, when standards for public buildings sank to an all-time low.

It is a vision that has sudden significance for Los Angeles. Initial discussions on a new federal courthouse at an unspecified downtown site began several years ago. (The existing Spring Street courthouse will become the federal Bankruptcy Court.) Last month, the GSA unveiled its short list of eight architectural firms that will compete to design the $250-million-plus project: Kohn Pedersen Fox, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, Perkins & Will, Cannon Dworsky, Steven Ehrlich Architects, Rafael Vinoly Architects and Richard Meier & Partners.

The list includes a number of competent architectural firms--something that would have beenimprobable in a GSA project only a decade ago. Kohn Pedersen Fox and Skidmore Owings & Merrill are well-established corporate architects. Both are capable of tasteful, inoffensive design. Two others--Richard Meier and Rafael Vinoly--have demonstrated the skill to produce works of real architectural substance.

But while the GSA’s list reflects a significant shift in who the government is choosing to design its buildings, and may even signal that the most dismal period of federal architecture is finally behind us, we still might ask ourselves: Is that enough?

In its potential impact on the downtown landscape, the courthouse project ranks alongside Frank O. Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. But as a whole, the list of architects--which was culled from a meager pool of 20 applicants--lacks creative range. Nor does the list maintain the kind of minimal standards that would guarantee a design that rises above the mediocre. What we end up with, in fact, is still a coin toss.

To some, Feiner’s past may make him an unlikely hero. He began his architectural career at New York’s Cooper Union in the mid-’60s, when the school was considered a center of architectural experimentation. Instead of entering the professional mainstream, Feiner joined the U.S. Navy master planning program. He left the military for a brief stint as a designer at Gruen Associates--a respected Modernist firm best known for its mall designs--before returning to the Navy and finally joining the GSA in 1981.

At the time, government buildings were shaped by the same kind of bottom-line mentality as the worst commercial developments. Most were bland, sterile boxes whose main function was to deaden the human spirit. Feiner and his staff set out to change that. In 1990, as a way of demonstrating the government’s renewed interest in architecture, they established the GSA’s annual Design Awards, which recognize the best designs for government buildings. At the same time, the judicial system was trying to cope with a severe overcrowding problem due to an increase in court cases. As a result, Congress approved a major increase in allocations for courthouse construction.

The courthouses were the perfect launch pad for Feiner’s ideas. He immediately set out to convince judges--the de facto client in all courthouse buildings--of architecture’s symbolic role in upholding the stature of the federal court system.

Among his earliest victories was hiring Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners to design a courthouse in Boston. The firm was not a particularly risky choice. Having established its reputation designing the most luxurious kind of corporate Modernism, it is not out to challenge conventional design norms. But at its best, such as in the design of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, the firm’s mastery of the fundamental tools of architecture--structure, proportion, scale--give the work a suave refinement lacking in conventional building.

Soon Feiner began to attack more systematic problems. In 1993, he streamlined the application process for government projects. Excessive experience requirements were relaxed. And a new peer-review system was established.

More critical perhaps, Feiner got government officials talking about architecture for the first time since the early ‘60s when Daniel Patrick Moynihan made a short-lived appeal to raise the abysmal standards of government design. Feiner’s new review panels served to bridge the gap between two worlds: the creative world of the architect and the more prosaic world of judges and bureaucrats. Sequestered in government conference rooms, the various groups engaged in serious discussions about architecture’s symbolic value and cultural meaning.

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Nonetheless, the results remain mixed. Of the 25 new courthouses completed under the program so far, few rise to the level of Meier’s courthouse in Islip, N.Y. Anchored to its site by a spectacular, white cylindrical entry rotunda, the building is more than an aesthetic tour de force; it is a carefully calibrated environment. A gaping atrium separates judges from ordinary citizens, who in turn can gaze out over the surrounding landscape through the delicate glass facade before entering the vault-like courtrooms. The boundary between each zone is so finely tuned that it seems on the verge of shattering at any moment. In effect, the building becomes a powerful metaphor for the fragility of our common ideals.

Yet such subtlety is the exception. A more typical example is Cannon Dworsky’s recently completed courthouse in Las Vegas, a brooding granite structure that is a testament to the fortress-like mentality that arose in the wake of the notorious 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma.

The Las Vegas courthouse shares many of the features of the Meier project. Its L-shaped, granite-clad form embraces two sides of a drum-like entry rotunda. Stainless-steel louvers line the main facades. But the building’s brutal concrete exterior is an expression of a slightly paranoid view of the outside world. A muscular, 90-foot steel column--used to support a canopy that partially covers the plaza--only adds to that aura of military hardware transformed into building components.

It’s too early to predict whether either of these buildings will serve as a model for Los Angeles. But the inconsistency in the quality of the designs indicates there are some fundamental issues Feiner has yet to solve. Despite efforts to attract first-rate talent, many architects still avoid government projects, which--rightly or wrongly--they equate with bureaucratic meddling and red tape. What’s often left are architects with the sharpest political instincts, not the finest talents. It is exactly those architects with the least talent, in fact, who are most apt to spend their energy honing those political skills.

In addition, the program remains largely ethnocentric. Architects are international creatures. Gehry--the torchbearer of Los Angeles architecture--has redefined the cultural identity of a small city in northern Spain. With their design of the new Tate Modern, the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have done as much to revive London’s once moribund cultural scene as half a dozen British-born art stars. Even the French--ever fearful of the Hollywoodization of Gallic culture--were willing to give over the redesign of the Louvre to an American of Chinese descent. The GSA, however, has had little success in attracting overseas talent. The result has been less diversity, less creative input, more mediocrity.

In Los Angeles, things are off to a shaky start. GSA officials, who typically expect 50 to 60 responses during the first round of the application process, received less than half that number here. None of the city’s big architecture stars--Gehry or Thom Mayne, for instance--bothered to apply. According to sources, the GSA was worried enough about the talent level that they briefly considered extending the deadline. (In the end, the only late entry was Vinoly, who was added to the list after it was discovered that his application had been misplaced in the GSA’s San Francisco office.)

All is not lost. Meier or Vinoly each have the skill to produce a brilliant building. It is even possible--though highly unlikely--that one of the lesser teams could have a sudden, mid-career epiphany. What the city will not get is an array of creative proposals that teach us something of value about the unstable, shifting nature of the downtown landscape. Feiner, meanwhile, will continue on his Sisyphean journey.