680 2ND STREET

This was a commercial tenant improvement of 60,000 SF for a high-tech financial services firm located in San Francisco. The firm wanted a showcase office for its San Francisco headquarters, which would house a mix of corporate financial offices, technology developers, and administration. The site was a recently renovated 4 story structure with garage located in a former dry-dock facility. Set up for multi-tenancy, it had a relatively small floor plate not easily suited to a single tenant. The clients wanted to foster communication between floors and departments, as well as to allow for a flexible open office environment that would allow for growth and expansion. The solution was to connect the floors through a central circulation spine in the form of a stair. This penetrated the various floors on one axis, and stacked program around that axis-spine on all of the floors. The top floor was reserved for conferencing and meeting space concentrating major facilities such as break rooms, conferencing, and arterial support around the “spine”. It stretched from the ground floor lobby to the uppermost floor in a direct line, with support located centrally around it. The server room, built to cantilever over the main lobby, stretches the program in violation of the perimeter enclosure yet maintains its relationship to the spine.

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