Front and center at tomorrow’s Planning Commission meeting, the proposed 350-foot tower at 350 Mission, a 24-story building which would yield 340,000 square feet of office space, 1,000 square feet of retail, 23,500 square feet of subterranean parking, and a 12,700 square foot publicly-accessible atrium.
From the architects (SOM) with respect to the refined building design:
The entire office building at the corner of Fremont and Mission is cantilevered thirty feet in two directions. A fifty foot high by sixty foot long membrane of glass turns this corner and opens the great urban room to hundreds of thousands daily commuters and visitors arriving across the street when the Transbay Terminal is complete.
All barriers are removed between the social vibrancy of the urban room and the street through the use of ninety linear feet of sliding glass panels which literally open the building to the street, weather allowing, in San Francisco’s mild climate.
The urban living room is animated by a café, an amphitheater stair and two levels of seating for informal lunchtime dining and special events. This space is conceived as a highly kinetic environment, beginning with the movement of people as theatrical spectacle.
The idea of constant change continues to a digital canvas that wraps the lobby’s core wall and ceiling. The Digital Canvas itself will become a platform whereby art and culture can be displayed on screen, and animated graphics informs the public of the building’s sustainable features.
Wooden piles, salvaged from the site’s earlier structure, will be refinished and used as benches within this space. These benches, internally powered and attached to narrow channels, will slowly inch across the floor Anchored at the living room’s north and east corners, a coffee shop and sculptural retail pavilion will energize the building’s ground level.
The retail pavilion, elliptical in shape, is defined by a structural sheath of translucent glass. Its upper level provides space for tenant conferences and private dining. A grand staircase of wood and metal provides space for informal lunchtime dining and connects the ground floor to an additional mezzanine for a restaurant that overlooks and links via an exterior stair to an adjacent plaza.
Construction of the new tower would cost an estimated $85 million and take 22 months.
∙ EIR Today, Heald Gone Tomorrow At 350 Mission As Proposed [SocketSite]
∙ 350 Mission Street Headed For Formal Review (EIR) [SocketSite]
∙ 350 Mission Street Scoop Redux: Building Website Live [SocketSite]
∙ Transbay Center Plans: Revised, Refined, And Unveiled Today [SocketSite]
377200 sf for $85 million? $225 / foot? Seems low, considering we are a Union town.
Two things I like about this project are that basket weave glass skin and the “urban living room” that is sort of placed in the public realm on the ground floor. I hope that the conditions stipulate that the “digital canvas” be a purely decorative feature and never allowed to be used as an electric billboard. The temptation to extract advertising revenue will be high.
Doesn’t this somewhat mimic the Time Warner Center in New York for it’s glassed-in atrium. I like this idea of an urban living room.
Great project, but I wish it was twice as tall so it’d have more of an impact on the skyline and help modernize what is, imo, a pretty bland and dated one.
“These benches, internally powered and attached to narrow channels, will slowly inch across the floor.”
Sounds interesting. Is this their way of dealing with the sit/lie ordinance?
Geez, couldn’t they clean up the graffiti on the ground floor atrium walls and ceiling before they took the last photo?
Nice looking tower. My only complaint is that these buildings tend to SUCK at the street level. Look at 301 Mission for example, it’s a very nice tower, but they left us with a blank wall at the corner of Fremont and Mission. Seems to me that this is a major oversight considering the amount of foot traffic that this intersection should see once the new terminal is built.
I love what seems to be a sort of indoor/outdoor space as the lobby. Seems really welcoming, at least from the renderings.
And those benches could be really cool!!
Does the street-level space here satisfy the design critics? That seems to be one of the biggest criticisms of taller buildings around here.
Isn’t there an insane amount of commercial office space available right now in SF? I am wondering how this can ever be leased. Anyone?
“Isn’t there an insane amount of commercial office space available right now in SF? I am wondering how this can ever be leased. Anyone?”
Excellent question anon.
Yes there is an insane amount of empty office space in SF and several companies already here may be set to relocate out of SF. Twitter for one.
Just down the street on the opposite side plans for a 30ish story tower, which had been approved, were abandonned and it won’t be built. Cause there is no market for more office space in SF for at least the medium term future.
Will this ever get built? Hard to say – if it does it probably won’t be for 10 – 15 years.
I would think that $225/sf is in the ballpark. Jives with the numbers here in fact: http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/construction-forecast/news/2010/02/rsmeans-dollars-per-square-foot-construction-costs-four-office-building-typ
$225 is definitely an accurate budget for construction on this type of building, if it’s only core and shell you can sneak in under the $200/sf level. Remember, this is hard cost for the contractor only. No developer costs, no soft costs.
As OneEyedMan noted, a $225/SF cost estimate likely excludes indirect costs. The estimate also would likely exclude tenant improvements, which will probably add about $50/SF to $80/SF to the eventual cost. Counting everything, I think that it is likely that the costs would be close to $400/SF.
To everyone talking about building height:
The SF Planning Department -and no less than SPUR – wanted this tower to be much TALLER (around 700 feet) Not shorter but taller. As part of the Transbay plan, rationalized by “green”, “low-carbon” development and the need to generate air rights revenues to support the Terminal porject. You can see it in the early drafts of the Transbay Plan / EIRs etc.
The DEVELOPER opted out of the CITY’s very-tall building plan becuase sets forth economically unfeasible building types.
The City is reluctant to acknowledge this because it undermines the ultra tall tower logic that has not ironically (25 years late) been adopted by planning, but abandoned by developer and instututional real estate investors.
Yes, the market is “hot” right now with office leasing a la Twitter , Sales Force, etc. but it is ALL going far south of market and NONE in new high rises.
Actual getting office rents are higher in a good low rise B & T near brannan and 4th than they are in a low to mid floor in Embarcadero 1 or 2.
Now that Calvin Welch and Sue Hestor are fading form the picture the actual economy is doing the job for them.
All true but it is beginning to spill back over into downtown…
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2011/02/san-franciscos-financial-district.html
Good points Louis.
It would be ironic indeed if highrise construction comes to a halt in SF because of economics and not out of the the best efforts of the Welch and others to save the City’s scale.
Sadly a few too tall slipped in – ORH and The Millenium to name two. ORC in particular is an eyesore that ruined the skyline. Happily TRH will likely never be built.
The famous hills are all but obsured by a visually un-appealing string of highrises. If the height limit had been places at 20 to 24 stories the City’s skyline would have been saved. happening.
At this point we can only hope that plain old economics kills future plans for more tall buildings SOMA or anywhere in SF.
One of the most absurd rants I have ever read on this site. Thanks for the laughs Gil.
“At this point we can only hope…” Who is we? I for one, happen to think ORH and the Millennium Tower are great additions to the skyline and can’t wait for more tall towers to grace the area in between them.
I second the notion. ORH and Millennium are fantastic additions to the skyline- some of the best new buildings in the country. I look forward to many more to come! We’re not going to be in a depression forever, Gil.
I don’t know about an insane amount of space available right now — I am heavily into a search for 15,000 sf of class A space in the FiDi right now, and am struggling to find much that suits. I’ve found exactly three spaces that I am happy with, all in the same building (101 Cal). If this building existed today I’d snap up a full floor in a heartbeat. My agent has other clients with the same problem. So, there might be an insane amount of space that exists in 5000sf chunks, or 100,000sf chunks, I don’t know, but there are certainly not a lot of single floors available, and things seem to be leasing at a decent clip.