One Post Street Building

The One Post Street Building is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Welton Becket & Associates, and built in 1969 in San Francisco, CA.

One Post Street Building 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:

• McKesson Plaza between 1969 and 1979.
• Crocker Center between 1979 and 1983.
• Aetna Bulding between 1983 and 1992.

Its precise street address is 1 Post Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

Welton Becket & Associates 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 One Post Street Building a reality:

• Dinwiddie Construction as the Main Contractor
• MANNTECH Building Maintenance Systems in charge of Facade Consultancy
• Universal Land Company and Crocker Land Company as the Main Developer
• SWA Group's in charge of Landscape Architecture

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

The One Post Street Building uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and concrete slabs.

A framed tube-in-tube structure uses a central core, known as inner tube, which usually holds stairs, lifts and installations, and a perimeter of columns around it, which form the exterior tube. The interior tube is tipically more massive (often made of reinforced concrete), and the exterior tube is "lighter" (made of steel or concrete columns). Both tubes are conencted via horizontal elements which make up the floors and also transmit any horizontal froces from the facade to the core.

The facade of the building is load bearing. This is a direct consequence of the integration of the exterior "tube" into the facade, something which most framed tube-in-tube buildings do in order to liberate the interior space from structural elements and achieve a more flexible interior.

So the facade of the builing is techinically load-bearing, yes, however, in between the load-bearing colums we find a curtain-wall type of facade, which by itself would not be cosnidered load-bearing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall divided into 9 bays on each side by the structural columns that have been pushed to the perimeter. These columns, visible from the outside, as well as the parts covering each floor's slab, are clad in 2,5cm thick Norwegian granite mounted on precast concrete panels.

The 13th and last floors are reserved as technical floors and therefore feature metal grids that allow for natural ventilation instead of glass.