Whoa possible record breakers for both SF and California. I wonder what the engineering height limit is with today’s tech in regard to earthquakes.
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Pelli’s original Salesforce Tower plan was 1200 ft. and one of the original proposals by SOM was 1375 ft. The original plan for Wilshire Grand was 1250 ft.
If those proposals are anything to go by, these firms seem to think something between 1200-1400 is doable in earthquake country… but of course, both of them got downsized. Salesforce was more for political/shadow-related reasons. I’m not so sure about Wilshire Grand.
I would wager it’s more about what’s financially feasible than what’s technically possible. Building supertalls is already exorbitantly expensive — when you add in all the earthquake-resistance technology, the return on investment probably evaporates at a certain height.
Given all that, plus the current development climate in SF, I would be pretty if this actually gets built at 1225 ft. But I’d be happy to be wrong!
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A building with a spire would be awesome here.
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the building that would be demolished is 492 feet tall.
It seems that’s taller than the tallest structure in San Francisco’s history that has been torn down
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that tower is unlikely to go. There is more property for the development.
huh?
The new plan would have 77 Beale Street demolished and replaced with a “slender” 1,225-foot office tower, with a total of 1.6 million square feet of office space along with retail and restaurant space down below.
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Considering the Tokyo Skytree survived the 2011 Tohoku earthquake without any damage and many of the tallest buildings/structures in the world are located near the ring of fire (in China, Japan, SKorea, Taiwan), I’d say it’s pretty tall. atleast 2080’ tall relative to the Skytree’s height.
San Francisco is of course located atop several fault lines instead of being adjacent to one so that height figure may differ some since buildings would need to be able to absorb/dissipate more energy from the vibrations/sway. But there’s no reason to believe that a building couldn’t be engineered to withstand a direct hit from an earthquake, it probably just wouldn’t come out completely undamaged.
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I thought this is an interesting map, as it seems to suggest the area to the SW of the Market St / Embarcadero junction is on landfill, but I’m not sure how that relates to the Tokyo skyscrapers that survived the earthquakes (not on landfill?) and whether certain areas in San Francisco are as a result more expensive to build supertalls in.
source:
What Parts of San Francisco are Built on Land Fill? - Priceonomics
Afaik Tokyo Skytree is built on land that was not reclaimed/was always historically AMSL. Similar to both NYC and San Francisco, only the outermost portions around the bays are built on reclaimed land/landfill.
There are actually many skyscrapers in Tokyo built atop these reclaimed portions of land, but they are just built with deep foundations. You’re not wrong in believing that it is more expensive to build in these reclaimed areas of land though because it certainly is just because the foundations need to be engineered more.
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The existing tower at 77 Beale Street stands 492 feet tall with 34 floors containing just over a million square feet. The New Formalism building was designed by Hertzka and Knowles, with doors opening in 1971. If removed, 77 Beale would be tied with projects in Philadelphia and Kuala Lumpur as the 11th-tallest voluntarily demolished buildings in the world, the fifth-tallest in the country, and the tallest building ever demolished in California.
If built today, the 1,225-foot-tall skyscraper at 77 Beale Street would become the tallest building in California, the tallest in the country outside of Chicago or New York City, and the 11th tallest in the United States. The project would be just 25 feet shorter than the Empire State Building, and tied as the 67th-tallest skyscraper in the world, matching the Hengfeng Guiyang Center Tower in Guiyang, China. However, these milestones are far from guaranteed, as the plan is currently just the 12th-tallest in the nation’s pipeline. The current tallest proposal in the United States is Legends Tower, an approved 1,907-foot-tall mixed-use tower in Oklahoma City.
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Notably, 50 Main will still be constructed under this plan, albeit in a shorter form. “In contrast to the initial plans for a supertall tower, the garage would be replaced either by a 285-foot-tall apartment complex or a 400-foot-tall tourist hotel.”
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