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How the internet reshaped Market Street’s Art Deco monolith
The Twitter building, once known as the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart, got its start as a Depression-era furniture showcase
This is a story about adaptive reuse, unplanned obsolescence, and the way one building can straddle two centuries and come to embody the fickle nature of commerce in a modern American city.
The hulking, Mayan-inspired, Art Deco monolith originally known as the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart has stood on its Market Street block between Ninth and Tenth streets for 81 years now.
Completed in the summer of 1937—the same year as the Golden Gate Bridge—at a cost of $3 million and after just one year of construction, the massive showroom complex for wholesalers and manufacturers of home furnishings, carpets, lighting, drapery, appliances, and radios was never intended to be a public space. It was a space where out-of-town furniture retailers and industry tradespeople came together for seasonal trade shows, and where professionals in the world of home decor could comparison-shop the latest styles and technologies, room by room and floor by floor. A full nine floors of showrooms, to be exact, totaling over 600,000 square feet at the outset.
Love ’em or loathe ’em, these structures won’t be ignored
Thom Mayne’s jarring yet alluring Federal Building, an 18-story structure with a curtain of perforated steel punctuated by a large square cut-out framing a privately owned public park, and the Glen Park BART station, a concrete public transportation dream, divide many.
Architecture geeks admire them; others shield their eyes.
Here are a handful of San Francisco’s love-it-or-hate-it buildings. Many of them are of the contemporary variety, but also there are a few stalwarts in here for good measure.
Commercial fires are almost certain to make headlines. While structures, alarms, safety equipment and response times are far superior to those of just decades ago, commercial fires are still happen. What are the likely causes of these fires in commercial structures like offices, stores, hotels, warehouses and manufacturing plants?
Arson
Intentional fires, or arson are the fifth leading cause of fires in the United States. Fires of a suspicious nature are not necessarily arson.
Smoking
While tobacco use is down, smoking materials are still a major cause of commercial fires. Businesses should have proper containers in designated smoking areas for cigarettes to be properly extinguished.
Electrical and Lighting
It is somewhat understandable that the amount of electrical wiring and lighting in a commercial building can make a structure susceptible to fires. Wiring and lighting fixtures should be updated in older buildings and wiring and circuit breakers need to be sufficient to meet today’s demands.
Heating Equipment
Heating equipment in commercial buildings, like homes, is a major contributor to fires in the country. Older equipment and space heaters are problematic in commercial structures, especially in buildings that remain empty overnights and on weekends. Never use household extension cords with space heaters and make sure they are turned off when not in use.
The first phase in the historic preservation-minded rehabbing of Union Bank Plaza (UBP) in Downtown Los Angeles has wrapped up. Completed in 1967, the 40-story office tower, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz and Albert C. Martin & Associates in the International style, became the first L.A. skyscraper to be named as a Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM) earlier this year by the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission following a unanimous 5–0 vote. The nominating application for HMU designation was put forth by the Los Angeles Conservancy in July 2019.
Just after 03:30 hours, Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion 1 companies were dispatched to a reported structure fire in 17’s first-in at the intersection of Long Beach Ave. x Washington Blvd.
E14 was first on-scene and unable to locate any signs of fire. Upon further investigation, E17 found an outside rubbish fire impinging on a 100 x 300 single-story commercial building on the 2700 blk. of S. Long Beach Ave. (14’s first-in), approximately half a mile south of the reported intersection.
Buildings are broken down into five categories (Types 1–5), ranging from the stoutest of construction to that which will most likely fail rapidly when under fire conditions. Each building type has specific characteristics that ladder companies must be familiar with so that they are able to ventilate the building in the safest and most efficient way possible.
A building is best identified during preplanning, but there are distinct features that will help firefighters identify the building type as they pull up on scene. There are also several diagnostic techniques that ladder companies can use when they’re up close and personal with a building.
Labor and materials are arguably the two most critical ingredients of any construction project. No buildings transform skylines, no bridges span rivers and no homes rise from foundations without them. That’s why pricing of these two production components can mean cost-cutting is in store for other areas of the job budget or, given steep-enough increases, the scuttling of the project altogether.
San Francisco-based developer Carmel Partners has broken ground on its first Arts District project. The planned 35-story project designed by Works Progress Architecture will rise at 520 S. Mateo St., near the Fourth Street Bridge. The main tower will include 475 live/work apartments, including 50 affordable units.
