Interesting new/green federal bldg in SF (photos)

Morphosis does it again, along with local firm

I'll clip part of the article, best to go there as there are a lot of photos and I don't want to take the time to link each here.

Very interesting building, and article. I'll be curious how the people who will be working there soon will take to the building complex. Thom Mayne, the key architect, is local to my old neck of the woods, Santa Monica/Venice, CA; I'm liking his presence now on the larger world scene.

There is an underlying question relative to San Francisco, which, like Paris - where Morphosis has devised a superduper serious building design - has worked to keep tall buildings out. There was a great brouhaha back in the late sixties or, I'm not sure, maybe seventies, where a clothing designer (Alvin Duskin, if I remember correctly) led a successful attempt not to coat the city by the bay with sky reachers. This building is well back from the Golden Gate.... I'll be interested in what allowances there are now for height/exactly where. Eighteen stories is stubby by skyscraper standards, but tall re San Francisco.

So, the clip ----


TOWERING EXPECTATIONS
S.F.'s new federal building challenges ideas of what a government high-rise should look like -- its humane design is green, dazzling
John King, Chronicle Urban Design Writer
Sunday, February 25, 2007


San Francisco has never seen a tower like the federal building about to open at Seventh and Mission streets.
Neither has the United States.
No other tower in America is shaped so resolutely by the desire to create a healthy environment for workers while reducing the use of energy and natural resources. And no other high-rise so casually defies expectations of how a tower "ought" to look.
The result is both daunting and dazzling, up to and including the stainless steel panels that fold over the broad concrete frame like some immense origami whim.
Like it or not, this is architecture at its provocative best. The 18-story structure and its four-story annex show how buildings fit together. They demonstrate that simple materials can be used in fresh ways, and they prod you to think about how design and the environment are linked.
The complex includes the annex that sits at a right angle to Mission Street and a plaza framing a small cafe building at the corner of Seventh and Mission. But the attention-getter is the tower -- a slab parallel to Market Street that's 345 feet wide, 240 feet tall and 60 feet deep.
The south-facing wall is draped in panels of perforated stainless steel, a theatrical sunscreen that seems to ripple and snag as it careens toward the plaza. The northern facade is entirely different: It could almost be mistaken for a scaffold as floor-to-ceiling glass spreads out behind a taut grid of metal catwalks and 55 thin rows of opaque glass fins.
Crowning all this are steep folds of perforated steel that form a hollow cone held in place by V-shaped trusses. The panels hide rooftop mechanical systems and accentuate the slab's height, tapering from east to west.
The federal building is even more conspicuous because nearby blocks are low; it becomes a billboard of contemporary design looming large in views from Interstate 80 and Nob Hill. It provides a blunt finale to the view through Civic Center from the steps of City Hall.

End of clip, lot more to article.