New tower with a twist
Glass high-rise at 350 Mission St. just 30 stories — but it’s ambitious
Considering that it clocks in at just 30 stories, the office tower at Mission and Fremont streets may be San Francisco’s most ambitious new high-rise.
In the air, the flat shaft with its hint of a checkerboard pattern wants to show us that not all glass towers are alike. On the ground, the tall lobby is designed to blur the line between public and private space in fresh ways.
It’s too soon to say if the latter goal will be reached. But as a well-tailored addition to our increasingly cluttered skyline, 350 Mission St. makes a convincing case that good buildings don’t need size to stand out.
This is important to remember now, when too many marquee buildings rely on extreme height or contorted shapes to catch the eye. San Francisco planning rules help thwart the worst examples of self-indulgence, but
there’s still an urge by developers and their architects to resort to one-note gimmicks.
Not so at 350 Mission St.
The basic package is simple, with the office floors stacked atop the 50-foot-tall lobby and a rear mezzanine that will hold a posh Michael Mina restaurant come this fall. The tower hugs the sidewalk and rises a flat-topped 415 feet.
Tall as this sounds, it’s 230 feet below the summit of Millennium Tower directly across the street — insert your own joke here — and not even half the ultimate height of the 1,070foot Salesforce Tower still climbing on the next block. It also falls short of the 700 feet allowed by zoning — the original developer balked at going higher because another bank of elevators would would eat up too much leasable space.
The approved project was purchased by Kilroy Realty, which started construction after signing homegrown tech giant Salesforce to occupy all of the tower’s office space.
Despite the diminutive presence from afar, 350 Mission makes a strong impression up close.
For starters, the tower isn’t a simple rectangle of smooth glass. On every floor above the base, at 5-foot intervals, the glass panel either tips out 8 inches or leans in to the same extent, a pattern that’s reversed on the floors above and below. The panes are held in place by thin aluminum mullions, so there are angled threads of metal as well.
Craig Hartman, Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s lead architect on 350 Mission, likens the effect to a basket weave, “a way to give texture and depth to a glass building.” This doesn’t quite happen — glass by its nature is two-dimensional — but the linear ripples of the intricate folds make for great optical effects.
Sometimes it’s as if each side of the tower is an endless grid of light and dark. At other moments, from more oblique angles like the pedestrian shortcut down from Beale Street, lines of diamonds slide down the tower in diagonal rows.
Other small touches are exquisite.
On a late winter afternoon on Mission Street, for instance, the glass is a rich monochromatic blue — but laced by silver stitches. And if you catch the top two levels of the “basket” in direct sunlight, they’re revealed to be a translucent, seemingly delicate mechanical screen.
The question is whether 350 Mission will be as successful down low as up high.
Hartman’s aim here was nothing less than to create an “urban room” where the publicly accessible space required by San Francisco’s downtown plan becomes a civic asset. The model is 101 Second St., another tower by Hartman and Skidmore where the base doubles as a glassy oasis that, long after the tower’s 1999 debut, serves as a casual gathering spot for everyone from art students to executives.
At 350 Mission, the ground floor corner has folding panels that pull back 30 feet in each direction, so that when open there’s no separation between inside and out. Alongside the gray marble stairs leading to the mezzanine is amphitheater-scaled seating using planks of reclaimed oak.
Even the public art aims to pull in passersby — a 40-foot by 70foot video screen that cloaks the lobby wall above the central elevators. The initial installation is by Refik Anadol, a fluid swirl of patterned images that is especially arresting from outside at dusk.
But the aspirations here won’t necessarily succeed.
Unlike at 101 Second, or last year’s LinkedIn tower at 222 Howard St., the public space isn’t a room detached from the comings and goings of tenants upstairs. It’s also the lobby — a lobby with only one tenant upstairs, which means there’s a big Salesforce logo above the long security desk and books about the firm on each of the lobby’s leathertopped benches.
As corporate citizens go, the company founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff can’t be beat. Not only does it write large checks, employees are encouraged to volunteer time to worthy causes while on the clock. But Salesforce sees the new tower as part of its emerging corporate campus, even placing “Salesforce East” in metal letters above 350 Mission’s main entrance.
The intended message at 350 Mission — that all of us are welcome — doesn’t come through nearly as well.
This could change if the corner panels stay open as often as weather allows. It’s also important that the “urban room” include a vendor of coffee and other casual offerings. With touches like these, people in the fast-growing district might come to see the “urban room” as part of their personal terrain, rather than the passageway to expensive food and corporate meetings.
Even though Salesforce employees began moving upstairs last March, the ground floor was cloaked by scaffolding until the holidays while work on the facade was completed.
In the months ahead, we’ll see if Salesforce and Kilroy are serious about living up to 350 Mission’s potential. I’m hoping that the end result is a pleasant surprise — and that tower employees aren’t the only people lounging on those comfortable oak planks.