Transamerica Pyramid

The Transamerica Pyramid is a Postmodernist skyscraper designed in 1968 by William L. Pereira, and built between 1969 and 1972, for a reported $32.0 million dollars, in San Francisco, CA.

Its precise street address is 600 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

In 2022 the Transamerica Pyramid was awarded with the Silver WAN Awards for Best Commercial Future Project.

The pyramid-shaped building with four faces has two "wings". One on the east face to accommodate the elevator shaft and another on the west face for the staircase and smoke tower. It is crowned with a pyramidal spire covered with aluminum grids.

The building underwent a major restoration between 2020 and 2024. The architect commissioned to undertake this restoration was Foster + Partners.

William L. Pereira 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 Transamerica Pyramid a reality:

• Chin & Hensolt Inc., Glumac International,and Simonson & Simonson in charge of Structural Engineering
• Dinwiddie Construction Company as the Main Contractor
• Otis Elevator Company as the company in charge of the elevators system
• Transamerica Corporation as the Main Developer

The Transamerica Pyramid can be categorized as a Postmodernist building.

The Transamerica Pyramid was completed in 1972. 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 Transamerica Pyramid was therefore every much in line with what the architecture community, and the people liked and wanted at the time.

The Transamerica Pyramid 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 uses a non-load bearing modular, or panelized system. This type of facade can function as either a window wall or a curtain wall, depending on the design. Unlike traditional glass curtain walls or window walls though, the modular facade is not primarily composed of glass. Instead, it often features more opaque panels that mimic masonry or stone-clad finishes, with smaller windows cut into the panels.

This type of facade allows the building to benefit from the modern qualities of a curtain wall while giving the design team flexibility to achieve visual aesthetics beyond the all-glass modern skyscraper.

In addition to the outer frames, four inner frames extend upward in each direction until the 17th floor, and then get reduced to two up until the 45th floor.

Starting at the 29th floor two triangular buttresses rise on the west and east sides of the tower. These external vertical extensions are both aesthetic and functional elements. They allow the top, smaller floorplans, to preserve their interior usable space by removing the vertical communications and technical installations from the main space. The eastern buttress supports the shaft, while the West embraces a stair shaft and exhaust outlet.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a panelized system made of precast concrete panels. These panels are composed of white quartz aggregate, giving the facade its distinctive light color and textured appearance.