One Montgomery Tower

The One Montgomery Tower is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and built in 1982 in San Francisco, CA.

One Montgomery Tower 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 One Montgomery Tower is also known, or has been known as, Montgomery Tower, Post Montgomery Center, or Pacific Telesis Tower.

Its precise street address is 120 Kearny Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

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

The One Montgomery Tower can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The One Montgomery Tower 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 Montgomery Tower was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The One Montgomery Tower 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 non-load bearing either, as it is common in frame structure type buildings.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features two light tones of colored red granite slabs framing the tempered glass windows with aluminum frames, accentuating each floor with a decoration of small squares. The same material appears in larger panels that frame the four corners of the building, from the ground up.