Salesforce West

The Salesforce West is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and built between 1983 and 1985 in San Francisco, CA.

Salesforce West is not the only name you might know this building by though. Between 1985 and 2015 it was also known as 50 Fremont Center.

Its precise street address is 50 Fremont Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2015 and 2018.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 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 Salesforce West a reality:

• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in charge of Structural Engineering
• MANNTECH Building Maintenance Systems in charge of Facade Consultancy
• Fremont Properties as the Main Developer

The Salesforce West can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Salesforce West was completed in 1985. 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 Salesforce West was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Salesforce West uses a frame structure made of steel columns and concrete and steel 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 glass and stone cladding covering the entire building, including staggered vertical bays at each corner, which rise to the building's crown, narrowing the exterior and emphasizing its verticality.