A soaring symbol of San Francisco’s past, 140 New Montgomery—also known as the PacBell Building—has become a hub for some of the Bay Area’s most forward-looking companies.
Dramatically framed by Morphosis’s glassy Federal Building looming behind it, the revived Strand theater, a gleaming red experimental performance space and education center for the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, clicks into its site on San Francisco’s Market Street like one of the final pieces of a complex puzzle.
In San Francisco, the latest tech office has the cultural prominence a lavish restaurant or fancy boutique would elsewhere. As the battle to entice technical talent continues, designers strive to outdo the competition with their imaginative environments.
Atlanta-based developer Jamestown wanted its Pacific Place office building, at 22 Fourth Street in downtown San Francisco, to appeal to young tech workers with a lobby similar to that of a hip hotel.
On the site of an 850-square-foot cottage from the early 1900s, the architects sought to create two new compact, modern, single-family homes in an architecturally conservative area.
A new condominium building in an old waterfront section of San Francisco sparks up the neighborhood with its serrated facade. 'When I was looking for an apartment, I saw the facade and immediately called my real-estate agent,' says Mark Chila, a resident of 616 20th Street in San Francisco. 'I was lucky: the condominiums were almost sold out.'