Salesforce Tower

The Salesforce Tower is a Contemporary skyscraper designed in 2005 by Pelli Clark & Partners, in association with Kendall Heaton Associates, and built between 2013 and 2018, for a reported $1.10 billion dollars, in San Francisco, CA.

Its precise street address is 415 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Salesforce Tower has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 2018. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• CTBUH Best Tall Building in 2019
• Global Best Project, Engineering News Record in 2018
• Award of Excellence, AIA Connecticut in 2018
• The American Architecture Award, The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies in 2020

The Salesforce Tower is connected to the city’s brand-new Transit Center, which is developed beneath a 21,853 square meter park which was also designed by Pelli Clark & Partners.

At the time of its completion in 2018 the Salesforce Tower incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included a blackwater on-site recycling system, which was the largest in a high-rise commercial building in the United States and the first of its kind in San Francisco. The Blackwater system reduces drinking water use by 3 billion liters per year.

Pelli Clark & Partners was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design, in association with Kendall Heaton Associates.

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 Salesforce Tower a reality:

• Magnusson Klemencic Associates in charge of Structural Engineering
• Clark Constrruction, and Hathaway Dinwiddie Joint Venture as the Main Contractor
• Morrison Hershfield in charge of Facade Consultancy
• Schindler as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Boston Properties, Inc., and Hines Interests Limited Partnership as the Main Developer
• WSP Group in charge of MEP Engineering
• Peter Walker & Partners in charge of Landscape Architecture
• Jim Campbell as the collaborating Artist

The Salesforce Tower can be categorized as a Contemporary building.

The Salesforce Tower uses a framed tube-in-tube structure , with steel columns and reinforced 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 employs a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame at the edges of the floor slabs. The perimeter columns are set back slightly from the facade, allowing them to remain independent of the curtain wall system.

This configuration enables a completely free design of the curtain wall, unencumbered by structural elements, thus providing greater flexibility in aesthetic choices and maximizing the visual impact of the exterior.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a reflective glass curved curtain wall. The corners of the building are heavily rounded, but even the four sides of the squared-based floorplan are not perfectly straight and continue with a slight curve. A small, white metallic eave marks each floor, while also hiding a grille that allows for air to flow into the building and circulate through the technical floors and ceilings, helping to bring fresh air into the building. Crowning the building above the top floor is a semi-transparent structure that lights up at night and can even project some low-res graphics.