The Bellaire Tower

skyscraper
art-deco
CA
San Francisco

About the The Bellaire Tower in San Francisco
Architect and team
Architectural style
Spaces and uses
Structure and materials

The The Bellaire Tower is an Art-deco skyscraper designed in 1928 by Herman Carl Baumann, and built between 1929 and 1930 in San Francisco, CA.

The Bellaire Tower 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 The Bellaire Tower is also known, or has been known as, Jewel, or Superman building.

Its precise street address is 1101 Green Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The building underwent a major restoration in 2018. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was JFM Enterprises Inc.

Building's timeline

Design completed

1928

Construction begins

1929

Construction completed

1930

Restoration

2018

years ago

2024

2018 - Cracks were sealed, the steel was coated with an epoxy-cement coating, the windows were addressed, the exterior walls were power washed and coated with an elastomeric, breathable, waterproof coating. The architect in charge was JFM Enterprises Inc.

Architect and team

Herman Carl Baumann was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Architectural Style

The The Bellaire Tower can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.

Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.

The The Bellaire Tower was completed in 1930, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

Spaces & Uses

The The Bellaire Tower reaches an architectural height of 253ft (77m). It has a total of 22 floors, 20 above ground and 2 basements, served by 3 elevators.

Ever since opening its doors to the public in 1930, the The Bellaire Tower has mainly been used as Residential space.

About the residences

The The Bellaire Tower has a total of 64 residential units throughout its 20 floors.

Materials & Structure

The The Bellaire Tower 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 is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features an ivory-colored patch of Portland cement and columns and arches as ornamentation.