UC Berkeley has published the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Innovation Zone, a two-structure laboratory along the western edge of the university’s campus. New details shared in the document reveal that the proposed North Building is the latest to become the tallest building in Berkeley, and construction could start as early as this summer. Details about the tower design and financing have not been published.
The 21st tallest tower in the Bay Area planned or built is Spear Tower in SoMa, San Francisco. Rising to a 564-foot pinnacle, Spear Tower is the taller of a two-towered complex, One Market Plaza. Rising across the Embarcadero, the development was completed in 1976, connecting the two new towers with the 11-story 1916-built Landmark Building on Market Street. Welton Becket Associates is the building architect.
50 California Street is tied as the 34th-tallest building in the Bay Area planned or built. The 1972-built tower in San Francisco’s Financial District shares the same height as 555 Mission Street, 487 feet above street level. Originally known as the Union Bank Building, its distinctively ubiquitous modernist design from the Welton Becket architecture firm was part of a larger moment in the city’s development history of rapid economic growth and local anxieties about the ‘Manhattanization’ of the West Coast metropolis.
Coming in as the 46th tallest tower in the Bay Area planned or built is One California Street in the Financial District of San Francisco. While it is not high on the list, the building holds an extraordinarily prominent position looking over two entrances to the busy Embarcadero BART station along Market Street and nearby the San Francisco Ferry Building. The building topped out in 1969 at 438 feet, making it the fifth tallest skyscraper in the city until 1971.