One Front Street Building

The One Front Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and built between 1979 and 1982 in San Francisco, CA.

One Front Street Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1980 and 2000 it was also known as Shaklee Terraces.

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

In 2008 the One Front Street Building was awarded with the Recipient of San Francisco’s EARTH Award.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

The One Front Street Building can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The One Front Street Building was completed in 1982. 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 One Front Street Building was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The One Front Street Building 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 uses a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame, typically by being attached to the edge of the floor slabs. The curtain wall system connects to the slabs using brackets, anchors, and mullions, which transfer the loads imposed by wind and temperature changes, to the building's primary structural elements.

This setup allows the curtain wall to accommodate differential movement between the facade and the structural frame, such as thermal expansion, floor deflection, or sway from wind forces. This system's integration with the slab edges also allows for continuous insulation and weatherproofing layers.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a flush and finely scaled aluminum skin with black-glass windows, establishing a uniform pattern from the sidewalk up to the roof. Rounded corners on Market Street rise uniformly to the 32nd level giving the building it's very unique silhouette.

The distinctive silhouette of the One Front Street building is reminiscent of the Shell-Haus building in Berlin, designed by Emil Fahrenkamp in 1931. This similarity highlights the building's connection to historical architectural styles.