At Transbay Block 5, 43-Story Office Tower Wins Approval with ‘Mini-Parks’ in the Sky
Renderings via Goettsch Partners
Last week, the office tower planned for Transbay Block 5 officially moved ahead with approval from the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure (OCII), the successor to the Redevelopment Agency that’s been overseeing the development of the Transbay District. And now the development team, a joint venture between Golub & Company and the John Buck Company, has released renderings and launched a website. Dubbed Park Tower, the building will shoot to 43 stories at the corner of Howard and Beale streets, across from the now-rising Transbay Transit Center. The irregularly shaped, 29,000-square-foot site leaves scant room for ground-level landscaping, so the building’s upper floors will sport more than 25,000 square feet of landscaped decks, or “mini-parks in the sky,” in architect Goettsch Partners’ parlance. Local firm Solomon Cordwell Buenz is on board, along with Stevens + Associates Architects.
The project still needs an office space allocation under Proposition M—the 1986 law capping new office construction at 875,000 square feet per year—and that will be heard at the Planning Commission on July 9. As planned, Park Tower’s 751,500 square feet would take up a goodly chunk of that. The project also includes 10,000 square feet of retail space.
The tower’s form will be defined by a series of vertical glass fins and, of course, floor-to-ceiling glass for the class A++ office space within. At ground level, there will be a covered 5,000-square-foot outdoor plaza, a nicely sized POPOS adjacent to the lobby and retail space. A site-specific artwork for the space is TBA, but it will somehow be incorporated into the main wall of the tower’s core, per the architects.
The building’s height will rise to 605 feet, the maximum allowed for the site by the redevelopment plan (which caps height at 550 feet, plus 10 percent for nonhabitable architectural elements that conceal mechanical systems).
Assuming all Prop M-related matters are settled, the project is set to break ground in October and open for business in early 2018.
