McAllister Tower Apartments

The McAllister Tower Apartments is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Lewis P. Hobart, and built in 1930, for a reported $2.80 million dollars, in San Francisco, CA.

McAllister Tower Apartments 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 McAllister Tower Apartments is also known, or has been known as, 100 McAllister, Temple Methodist Episcopal Church, William Taylor Hotel, or Empire Hotel.

Its precise street address is 110 McAllister Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The McAllister Tower Apartments 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 Art Deco style. Because of that, the McAllister Tower Apartments was officially included in the San Francisco Register of Historic Places in 2009.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1938 and 1981.

Lewis P. Hobart was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The McAllister Tower Apartments can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The McAllister Tower Apartments was designed in 1920. These were the early days of the Art Deco movement, when the style hadn't yet reached its maturity, and there fore it is more likely to to still have traces of the Classical or Gothic Revival periods which preceded Art-Deco.

Lewis P. Hobart took a risk by designing a building that was ahead of its time, and which other architects sure took inspiration from as the Art Deco movement evolved.

The McAllister Tower Apartments uses a frame structure made of steel columns and 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.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a pale-colored masonry brick work, with darker, ornamented metal plates covering the space between windows in the vertical direction. This emphathises the verticallity of the building by creating continuous stripes of lighter brick that go from the windowns on the second floor all the way to the top of the tower.