FALL 2016

GRADUATE STUDIO, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY

SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL, SAN FRANCISCO

PROF. WAYNE PLACE

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The city of San Francisco is home to some of the nation’s most successful technology and business companies, providing much of the impetus behind the city’s booming population. The explosive population growth has strained much of the area’s existing residential and commercial space in addition to significantly taxing the city’s municipal services, which struggle to keep pace with growth.

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The/One is a 600’ mixed-used residential tower providing 273 residential units, 150,000 square feet of office and 40,000 square feet of mixed-use commercial space within an accompanying120’ tall podium. To the tower’s north side is Market Street, a heavily trafficked street that also accommodates the city’s historic street car lines, bus rapid transit, and below the street run several of the city’s rail lines. Given the prominence of the site’s location, the project team intended to create an iconic tower that provided residential and commercial space, in addition to ground-floor retail and restaurant spaces. Furthermore, given the site’s accessibility via public transit, the team sought to create significant open air spaces that would allow for the public to also interact with the site.

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A significant feature of the tower project is the incorporation of green spaces, which ascend the tower vertically along the building’s southwest side and atop the building’s iconic podium terraces. These shared spaces for residents and employees alike provide an opportunity to reintroduce greenery into the predominantly concrete landscape; however, given the area’s significant drought and energy concerns, the project sought to incorporate sustainability strategies that would permit the adaption of these programs so as not to burden the city’s municipal services further.

In addition to making use of gray water systems, the building’s facade is outfitted with fog catchers, which passively collect water from wind driven fog coming from the west/southwest. Along one of the tower’s structural core walls, fog screen run vertically along the core, and water that is collected by the screens are used to irrigate the vertical gardens running up the building’s southwestern exterior. The water harvested from the city’s infamous fog is also able to be incorporated back into the tower’s gray water system.

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The tower also makes use of natural ventilation strategies for the passive cooling of residential units. An operable window/door system at the corners of end units allow for residents to take advantage of cross-ventilation to assist with cooling. Furthermore, the building’s segmented atria spaces allow winds from the west into the building in order to drive warm air out of the interior (middle) units and building’s atrium spaces. Periodic open floor pass-throughs also alleviate pressure on the building’s west/southwest facade and assist in mitigating the affects of wind-tunneling at street level.