580 California
San Francisco, California

This 23 storey building is located in the heart of San Francisco's financial district. The street level is carved out to provide a two-story arcade along the building's 125 foot frontage, providing access to both the office lobby and ground floor shops. The tower is organized classically with bottom, middle and top, into contrasting and harmonizing stylistic components. The corners are masonry, and in between is a facade of scalloped bays with ribbon windows separated by an order of granite columns, combining elements from the 1930s modernism of Chicago School skyscrapers and San Francisco's Victorian town houses. The corners act as solid anchors that, in collaboration with the columns, thwart the advance of the ribbon windows and their bulging stone spandrels.

At the base, the two-story arcade is arched only at the corners and tied together with a base course of Napoleon red granite and embellished with cast ornamental aluminum. Hanging in each bay are nine-foot lanterns of similarly detailed cast aluminum and translucent glass. These motifs are continued into the lobby, with walls are clad in gray granite, and floors of checkerboard gray and red granite edged with a grillwork balustrade variant of the design of the exterior ornamentation.
The top of the tower is pulled together in a two-tiered, gray-coated glass mansard roof. The corners are surmounted by grillwork and ornate finials, suggesting separate, but subordinate mansard roofs above each. Balancing these are 12-foot high statues, cast in fiberglass by the sculptor, Muriel Castanis. They are empty, toga-draped forms from which the figures have been removed, rendering the sculptures as abstracted reinterpretations of the neoclassical masterworks of Lorado Taft and Augustus Saint Gaudens.

Client: Hines Interest Partnership
Completion Date: 1985
Area: 360,000 square feet
Associate Architects: Kendall Heaton Architects

(Johnson/Burgee Architects)