Design Gives S.D. Skyline a New Shape
In a downtown dominated by boxy high-rises with flat tops, the new $130-million, 30-story Emerald-Shapery Center on Broadway at Columbia Street is the most sophisticated tower yet. Designed by San Diegan C.W. Kim, it is also the only major downtown high-rise in at least 10 years to be designed by a local architect.
Financed by the Japanese Tokyu Corp., the complex includes the 30-story office building that will open Monday and a 27-story Pan Pacific Hotel scheduled for completion later this year. Both take their shapes from hexagonal crystalline structures found in nature. Eight six-sided spires combine in clusters to form the towers.
Developer Sandor Shapery dreamed up the design in 1979, shortly after he acquired the property. Trained as a lawyer, he is also interested in architecture, and he looked to Frank Lloyd Wright for inspiration.
“Wright had the same philosophy I do,” Shapery said. “In order to build the most perfect building, one must look to nature, imitate nature. Nature is the perfect balance of all the forces in the universe. I took that concept and began to study crystals.”
Shapery hired Kim after spending $150,000 and 18 months working with Los Angeles architects A.C. Martin & Associates, whose proposed design departed too far from Shapery’s original concept.
“The only thing hexagonal about their design was the outside,” Shapery said. “The inside was all squares. It was a square building with jagged edges around the perimeter.”
Kim’s design, by contrast, made hexagonal forms the basis for most of the building’s elements, from the steel framework to fine decorative detailing. In some ways, this proved economical, since steel beams and other major parts are all the same size.
From a distance, the building’s profile is graceful and inspiring, bringing an Oz-like fantasy to downtown. The spires step back in height from 270 feet along Broadway to 400 feet along C Street. Alternating bands of light-green glass and concrete on the hotel or precast concrete panels on the office tower climb the walls of the towers before giving way, at the top, to solid glass spires that emerge like jewels from their settings.
Close up, urban planners will find much to like about the Emerald-Shapery Center. The base adapts well to Broadway, downtown’s major artery, and C Street, where pedestrians congregate near the San Diego Trolley line. By setting the towers slightly back from the base, Kim and Shapery softened the project’s impact at street level.
An Italian restaurant and a jewelry store will face C Street. The hotel’s restaurant, a croissant shop and a business center with rentable office suites for hotel guests will anchor Broadway.
Some earlier downtown high-rises are covered with reflective glass all the way to the sidewalk. Because pedestrians can’t see inside, these buildings seem cold and uninviting. The Emerald-Shapery Center will have clear glass all around its base, allowing glimpses into its restaurants and shops.
A slanted glass roof rises to 100 feet above an atrium that connects the office tower and hotel. Twin glass elevators will rise through this space at the side of the hotel, piercing the atrium’s roof on their way to the top. Escalators will move people up to the office tower’s second-level ballroom and meeting spaces and down to the underground parking lots. Below the escalators, reflecting ponds will be anchored by fountains resembling large crystal structures.
In addition, the developers are paying New York artist Richard Lippold $300,000 for a hanging sculpture of hexagonal elements that reportedly will resemble metallic Oriental lanterns. Sheets of emerald green acrylic will dangle from their inner spokes, and hexagonal prisms of polished aluminum will hang from their outer edges. (The project’s art budget is expected to exceed $600,000, following guidelines from the Centre City Development Corp. that require projects to include an art budget equaling 1% of hard construction costs. Hard construction costs include materials and labor, but not general contractor fees, consultant fees and the millions spent for project financing charges and interior furnishings and fixtures.)
Hexagonal shapes appear in many other areas too. Compact clusters of hexagonal spires decorate the corners of the project’s three-story granite base. Precast hexagonal concrete panels in gray and pale red pave public areas at ground level. Even the stainless-steel elevator doors received a hexagonal pattern--inlaid in brass.
The hexagon theme creates unusual shaped floors. Tenants and interior designers are accustomed to laying out offices within square and rectangular spaces.
“Obviously, its more difficult to lay out the spaces, but that’s not a negative,” said interior designer Megan Bryan of BSHA, which designed 14th-floor interiors for the accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand. “The reward is you get much more interesting spaces than you would in a rectilinear building, and much more access to daylight.”
By breaking the office portion of the project, which houses 375,000 square feet of space, into smaller hexagonal modules, Shapery and Kim have given tenants cozier offices. According to Kim, 30 to 35 feet is the ideal maximum distance from an internal space to a window. That is easily achieved here, but not possible with some conventional boxy office towers.
According to Kim, the Emerald-Shapery Center is the only downtown high-rise with operable air vents beneath some windows. By placing these slots below every third window on each floor, he made sure that each office and hotel room will have at least one vent.
One disappointment is that two helicopter landing pads clutter the project’s roof line. The developers had the option of leaving these off, using pressurized stairwells instead as a fire safety measure, but felt the loss of usable floor area would be too great. Also, the San Diego City Council asked Shapery to use a green glass lighter in color than the emerald he wanted. The original color would have made the building even prettier.
The Emerald-Shapery Center is the crowning achievement for Kim, 52. It easily surpasses two earlier downtown high-rises he designed while with Hope Architects & Engineers: the first of two Marriott Hotel towers near Seaport Village and the First National Bank building at Columbia and A streets.
What Shapery and Kim have achieved is a real breakthrough for downtown San Diego, a high-rise whose design is worthy of its prominent position in the downtown skyline.
For the Record: Because of an editing error in last week’s column on architect Wallace Cunningham, a caption under the photograph of the “Wing House” in Rancho Santa Fe misidentified the location of the house.
