Like a wise, omniscient, benevolent phallus looming over San Francisco, the 1,070-foot Salesforce Tower has become a distinctive part of the city’s skyline since its opening in February 2018, for better or for worse.

It has its detractors, of course.

“Salesforce Tower is an ugly robot penis,” inveighed one such critic on Twitter in 2018.

“Salesforce Tower is hella ugly,” wrote another tower-hater, Oakland journalist Azucena Rasilla, last summer.

But others think it is good. The literal best in the world, in fact.

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Last week, a group of professional tall building-appreciators named it the year’s best tall building, reports Curbed.

It’s true. The “Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats,” a Chicago-based nonprofit comprised of planners, engineers, architects, and other tall building enthusiasts that study tall buildings and decide how good and tall they are has deemed the Salesforce Tower the year’s most outstanding.

“The Best Tall Building Worldwide was chosen from several height range categories including Best Tall Building under 100 meters, Best Tall Building 100–199 meters; Best Tall Building 200–299 meters; Best Tall Building 300–399 meters and Best Tall Building over 400 meters,” the Council explains.

Although to the untrained, philistine eye of this reporter, it seems to be a pretty one-pronged building (but what a prong it is!), the Council praised the tower’s “multipronged focus on occupant health, sustainability, structural efficiency, and a significant level of integration with the surrounding urban habitat.”

The jurists appeared to be a fan of the role the tower plays in its neighborhood, sometimes referred to by new and oft-reviled nickname “The East Cut.”

“The building stands as the centerpiece of a new transit-oriented, mixed-use neighborhood recently freed up for development following the demolition of an aging transit center,” they wrote, leaving unacknowledged the iffy fate of the new transit center that replaced the old. “The result is not just a contribution to the city skyline, but a highly successful exercise in human-centric and resilient design for tall buildings.”

Locally, the reception has been more mixed. In 2018, Chronicle architecture critic John King described the tower as “underwhelming despite its size.” On the other hand, the Council on Tall Buildings deemed it “a building that gives back.”

Are they doing these innuendos on purpose?

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“The 1,070-foot shaft,” writes King, “with its tapered form of metal and glass, is a well-tailored behemoth. Immense but understated. Overwhelming yet refined. A study in thick-walled minimalism that seems to hover more than soar.”

You know what they say. It’s really the thickness of one’s minimalist walls that counts. But I digress.

“All of which makes for a nuanced tower, conscientious and self-assured even as it reorients the skyline and redefines San Francisco’s visual image,” King continues. “But there’s also an air of detachment, as if the creators were so busy being tasteful they forgot that big buildings can be fun.”

But of course, as anyone who’s ever endured a conversation about birdwatching or coin collecting or fantasy baseball can tell you, fun is in the eye of the beholder. And in the eyes of a bunch of tall building aficionados, what could be more fun than 1,070 feet of “robust,” “human-centric” steel and concrete?