The complex is designed for 1,700 government officials, which will be located on 18 floors of the main block. A four-storey annex was erected nearby, where a kindergarten, a gym and a cafe for employees are located.
Maine deliberately tried to make this building the "greenest" of such government projects in the United States, that is, erected and operated with the maximum economy of resources. But this approach came into serious conflict with the individual style of the architect, with his interpretation of forms, sometimes called post-apocalyptic; the long-established language of its architecture is hard to adapt to the specific demands of environmental activists. Many major architects may face a similar problem, since the construction of "green" buildings cannot be based only on the principles of the "global" architecture they are accustomed to. It is necessary to carefully study all the features of the very environment where the future building will be erected, including not only the climate and topography, but also the traditional methods of solving ventilation and heating problems for this area, the degree of pollution, the social situation, etc.
Maine, with all his attention to the needs of society and sympathy for left-wing politicians, could not fully shift his attention to this close to the soil, local level. As a result, his undoubtedly interesting building turned out to be both insufficiently "green" and not entirely thought out from the point of view of a formal solution.
The main visual feature of this administrative complex was a huge screen of mesh metal panels that covered the entire southern facade of the building. According to the calculations of the Arup engineers, the air heated by the sun must be held in the space between it and the wall itself, in order to then rise up, giving way to a cooler one, which will enter the room through the windows automatically opened according to the readings of the sensors. That is how, without using electricity, the problem of air conditioning should be solved. As for the issue of lighting, officials will be able to save electricity here by making the most of the sunlight. Continuous glazing of both facades should keep the need for additional light sources to a minimum. The building is a very small block in thickness - only 16 m, which makes it possible to well illuminate all workplaces through the windows.
A separate aspect of Main's resource-saving policy is the use of elevators that stop every three floors. As a result, people working in the construction will have to walk more stairs, which is certainly good for health. To diversify this practice, the architect designed a small atrium at each elevator stop, spanning three adjacent floors, where employees can relax and socialize.
At the same time, Maine moved away from the principles of "environmental awareness", designing the exterior design of the building. Its screen of steel panels continues in the horizontal plane as a canopy over the square in front of the building, as well as in the form of an end imitating a gable roof at the top of the main volume. Their function is to give the building more expressiveness, at the same time, it took more than one ton of steel to implement this idea, and after all, any building material also belongs to the irreplaceable resources of our planet.
But the architect's “eco-friendly” ideas have not always given an unambiguous result. If the office temperature fluctuating from 20 to 27 degrees Celsius can still be tolerated (the standard for air-conditioned rooms in the USA is 19 degrees), then the blinding sunlight penetrating through the continuous glazing of the southern facade forced the owners of the building to install ordinary blinds there (on the north side Main envisioned a frosted glass sunshade system).
Another aspect, already more related to the social environment: the building has a very small underground garage, which should encourage employees to get to work by public transport or on foot. At the same time, it is located on the very edge of downtown San Francisco, where the streets are not very clean and safe; this is of particular concern to the female part of the staff.
Such problems in the project of an architect who is just embarking on the path of "green" design are still understandable. But Maine built a bank headquarters in Klagenfurt, Austria back in 2002, which meets all the requirements of modern "resource conservation" (which has the status of law there).
At the same time, in the case of San Francisco, Tom Maine can still count his good intentions: he is one of the few major American architects who are actively trying to solve social problems (and in this case, environmental) with the help of their buildings, and also - strongly adhere to the "anti-corporate" aesthetics even in projects of buildings of public institutions and office complexes.
