The One Rincon Hill South Tower is a Contemporary skyscraper designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz, and built between 2005 and 2008, for a reported $300 million dollars, in San Francisco, CA.
Its precise street address is 425 First Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.
One Rincon South Tower is the tallest tower of a complex consisting of two luxury buildings known as One Rincon Hill. The two towers share a common townhouse podium.
Solomon Cordwell Buenz 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 Rincon Hill South Tower a reality:
The One Rincon Hill South Tower can be categorized as a Contemporary building.
Contemporary style architecture builds on top of the principles of Modernism and Postmodernism, but incorporates other variables which might not have been that important in the past, but certainly are today, such as technology, sustainability, inclusivity, and others.
From a historical point of view, it is hard to categorize things from a not-so-distant time, and therefore we choose to categorize most buildings built after the year 2000 as "Contemporary". It is possible that as time goes by and we, as a society, gain perspective on the things happening today, we'll be able to look back and recategorize all these buildings into more concrete subsections, some of which might not even exist today.
The One Rincon Hill South Tower reaches an architectural height of 640ft (195m), with the last accesible floor being 604ft (184m) off the gorund. It has a total of 61 floors, 54 above ground and 7 basements, served by 4 elevators.
In regards to parking space, the building has a total of 455 spots available, which roughly equals 8 spots per floor (above ground).
Ever since opening its doors to the public in 2008, the One Rincon Hill South Tower has mainly been used as Residential space.
The One Rincon Hill South Tower has a total of 390 residential units throughout its 54 floors.
Both the vertical and horizontal elements of the One Rincon Hill South Tower's structure are made out of reinforced concrete.
The facade in this case is non-load bearing, which means that it does not serve as a structural element, and therefore the architects had total freedom to work on its design without worrying about the support of the building.
The structure features a ductile concrete core wall and four stabilizing concrete columns connected by four-story-high buckling-restrained braces.The performance-based seismic design (PSD) eliminated the need for an exterior moment frame, which increased the size of individual units, provided unobstructed views, shortened construction time, optimized material quantities, and enhanced performance.
Four water dampers located at the top of the tower minimize the building's movement due to wind or seismic activity
From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall system made from floor-to-ceiling green-ish tinted glass windows and narrow light-colored horizontal bands marking each floor's slab level.
There are balconies on every floor, some of them protrude and others are retracted from the facade.
