575 Market Street Tower at Market Center

The 575 Market Street Tower at Market Center is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Hertzka & Knowles, and built in 1975 in San Francisco, CA.

575 Market Street Tower at Market Center is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Standard Oil of California Tower between 1975 and 2001.
• Chevron Tower.

Its precise street address is 575 Market Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

Hertzka & Knowles was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

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 575 Market Street Tower at Market Center a reality:

• H.J. Brunnier Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• Standard Oil of California as the Main Developer
• Theodore Osmundson in charge of Landscape Architecture

The 575 Market Street Tower at Market Center can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The 575 Market Street Tower at Market Center was completed in 1975. At that time Postmodernism was the prevailing style. Fresh, bold and daring, architects were exploring the freedom of designing without having to follow the strict, sometimes arbitrary rules of a specific architectural movement (which ironically became a movement itself). The 575 Market Street Tower at Market Center was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The 575 Market Street Tower at Market Center uses a frame structure made of steel columns and slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade uses a window wall system, which by itself is non-load-bearing. However, in this case, the facade is technically load-bearing, since there are structural elements that have been integrated into it, adirectly influencing the facade’s design.

Window walls are easier to install than curtain walls, often resulting in reduced construction time and cost. However, the exposed edge of the slabs, and in this case other structura elements too, are weak points in terms of thermal insulation. These areas need to be carefully detailed to prevent thermal bridging and potential condensation issues.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a grey marble clad with a repetitive pattern of windows whose volumes slightly protrude from the flat facade.