Hobart Building

The Hobart Building is a Neoclassic skyscraper designed by Willis Polk, and built between 1913 and 1914 in San Francisco, CA.

Its precise street address is 582–592 Market Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Hobart Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of San Francisco and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Neoclassical style. Because of that, the Hobart Building was officially declared as a national landmark in 1983, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

Willis Polk 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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Hobart Estate Company as the Main Developer.

The Hobart Building can be categorized as a Neoclassic building.

The Hobart Building uses a frame structure made of steel columns and reinforced concrete 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.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features ornamented terra cotta bricks cladding, which gives the building a deep texture on all its sides, expcept for the lower part of the west side, which used to be hiden by another building and ended up being a plain exposed wall after it was demolished. The top part of the building has a series of ledges and round arches that create a certain rythm as the building grows, very much as the capital of a classical column..

Other materials found at the Hobart Building include, granite, found at the entryway on the east corner of the building, rose and black marble, covering the floors and walls of the lobby, and bornce, used for the decorative elevator doors, as well as for the detailings of the mail chute.