555 California Street Building

The 555 California Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, in association with Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, and built between 1967 and 1969 in San Francisco, CA.

555 California Street Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1969 and 2005 it was also known as Bank of America Building.

Its precise street address is 555 California Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2017. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Huntsman Architectural Group.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Pietro Belluschi.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the 555 California Street Building a reality:

• H. J. Brunnier Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• Dinwiddie Construction as the Main Contractor
• Bank Of American National Trust & Savings Association as the Main Developer
• Lawrence and Associates in charge of Landscape Architecture

The 555 California Street Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The 555 California Street Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and concrete, steel slabs.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade employs a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame at the edges of the floor slabs. The perimeter columns are set back slightly from the facade, allowing them to remain independent of the curtain wall system.

This configuration enables a completely free design of the curtain wall, unencumbered by structural elements, thus providing greater flexibility in aesthetic choices and maximizing the visual impact of the exterior.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a faceted silhouette with bronze/tinted glass and polished carnelian granite cladding.

The shape of the floor plan repeats from floor to floor almost identically until the last 10 floors, where a series of setbacks make the top floors slightly smaller in size.