Spear Tower at One Market Plaza

The Spear Tower at One Market Plaza is an International Style skyscraper designed by Welton Becket & Associates, and built in 1976 in San Francisco, CA.

Spear Tower at One Market Plaza 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 Spear Tower at One Market Plaza is also known, or has been known as, Del Monte Building, or One Market Plaza.

Its precise street address is 1 Market 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 1996 and 2016.

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 at the very least we know that there was one other part involved, that was Turner Construction Company as the Main Contractor.

The Spear Tower at One Market Plaza can be categorized as an International Style building.

The Spear Tower at One Market Plaza 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 of the building however, is load bearing. This doesn't imply that it is a traditional load-bearing wall. Rather, it means that the structure's exterior pillars have been pushed to the very edges, becoming integrated with the facade, and therefore, technically, a part of it.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a strong contrast of dark glass with dark frames and whitish concrete panels on the spandrels and columns that organize the facade in several bays.

Other materials found at the Spear Tower at One Market Plaza include, white marble, found in lobbies, and cherry wood, used in elevators.