Almost Supertall Planned In San Francisco

Once upon a time San Francisco was considered to have one of the best skylines in the United States but after approaching three decades with little being built it looks curiously dated.

All this could change if a new tower by local Heller-Manus, gets the go-ahead. Standing on the site of 181 Freemont, the scheme if built will reach 274 metres in height making it marginally taller than the famous Transamerica Pyramid and creating a notable new pinnacle amongst a sea of substantially shorter buildings.

The developer of 181 Freemont, SKS Investments plans to have the lower floors of the building occupied by 46,550 square metres of office space with 140 luxury condominiums on the upper levels.

The design is dominated by zigzagging structural expressionism that resembles the Bank of China tower in Hong Kong. The diagonals also help to distort the structure and break up what otherwise be a stack of completely regular rectangular blocks.

The result of this is the gradually reducing floorplates as the building almost imperceptibly tapers causing them to shrink from a 1300 square metre base to 930 square metres on the upper level.

Avoiding a flat roof, the roof of the building will be slightly angled rounding off the triangular architectural expression on show with a spire rising past it having run almost all the way up the building as a sheer corner column.

Whether the scheme can actually be approved is another thing entirely as it completely shatters the zoning rules that currently allow a building of 100 to 150 metres. It does however show that along with the Transbay Terminal Tower, San Francisco is starting to look up again after a thirty year sleep.