• Address: 1650 Owens St., San Francisco, California 94158
• Phone number: (415) 734-2000
• Number of employees at move-in: approximately 300
• Number of employees at future full capacity: 550

• The building sits on private property owned by Gladstone across the street from the 43-acre UCSF Mission Bay campus and within a 302-acre mixed-use district, owned and managed in part by Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc., and by the Catellus Development Corporation. It is the first private biomedical research facility built at Mission Bay, forming the cornerstone of a planned biotech district.
• Project development and management consultant: Todd Sklar, AIA, Mezzatesta Sklar, San Francisco
• General contractor: Rudolph and Sletten, Foster City, California
• Number of subcontractors to Rudolph and Sletten: 73
• Architects: NBBJ, San Francisco
• Square footage: Approximately 200,000 square feet
• Site size: 1.1 acres
• Building footprint: 33,000 square feet
• Construction of the building encompassed:
  • 0.4 miles of project drawings
  • 0.9 acres of glass
  • 4.3 acres of finished floor space
  • 6.24 miles of precast concrete piles driven
  • 42.6 miles of poured concrete stacked in 1-cubic-foot blocks
  • 261 personnel onsite on a typical day
  • 2,640 sprinkler heads
  • 324,000 pounds of sheet metal in the duct work
  • 41,400,000 pounds of structural steel
  • 425 75-foot-high foundation pilings
• Construction cost: $74 million
• Complete cost: $145 million, including purchase and development of the land, financed through a 2001 bond offering (California Infrastructure & Economic Development Bank, Revenue Bond, Series 2001)

• Idea of a dedicated building: began being discussed in earnest in the mid-1990s
• Decision to buy and develop land at Mission Bay: 1998
• $145 million in bonds floated: 2001
• Preconstruction begins: June, 2001
• Design begins: May, 2002
• Construction start date: March 15, 2003
• Construction completion date: September 1, 2004
• Move-in: October 8-November 5, 2004

Building exterior:

• Features Conquistador Dorato granite walls
• A large, beautifully landscaped plaza has been developed behind the building, viewable through floor-to-ceiling first-floor windows

• The lobby echoes the exterior through use of Conquistador Dorato granite walls, with eucalyptus wood panels lining the interior core.
• “City Views,” a 2004 mixed media-on-canvas triptych by renowned artist Wayne Thiebaud featuring a Potrero Hill cityscape, is on display in the lobby. Thiebaud is widely recognized as one of the most prominent American painters of the latter part of the 20th century.
• A sleek 150-seat auditorium featuring a bamboo wood stage, fabric-wrapped walls, and mohair seats is located just off the lobby.
• The President’s Conference Room, designed for VIP meetings, features custom cherry casework and fabric walls.
• Although the first floor is an administrative floor, it features a large reading room/library area for use by all Gladstone employees, stocked with science journals.

• These floors are arranged in three long stripes: bench spaces on one side, administrative offices and cubes on the other, and specialized facilities down the center.
• Distinctively colored tile highlights cross-corridors connecting the stripes.
• There are approximately 100 bench spaces, also known as work spaces, per floor, arranged along 22 bench rows made up of two back-to-back bench spaces each, along with two half-bench rows made up of one bench space each. These add up to 46 bench spaces visible along a long corridor running along one side of the bench space stripe.
• These flexible spaces are designed to encourage interaction among scientists and researchers. Their configuration required the construction of a suspended, state-of-the-art lab case work system cantilevered from a core for flexibility. The case work system can be rearranged and reconfigured to accommodate a wide variety of arrangements for as many as 100 researchers on each floor. This suspended case work system also minimizes the amount of piping to the benches.
• There are three break-out, or pop-out, rooms per floor for impromptu meetings within the bench space stripe, featuring floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides and a sand-blasted sliding glass door to close off the space. An interior, opaque glass wall functions as a marker board.
• Center stripe specialized facilities include: cold rooms, similar to walk-in refrigerators in restaurant kitchens; ultra-low temperature freezers, maintained at about -80 degrees Celsius; and fume hoods, designed to dilute vapors and fumes with air while diverting them away from the lab space.
• These facilities also include biosafety cabinets, designed for in vitro research. They feature recirculation of air through high-efficiency particulate air filters to prevent particulates in the room from getting into the cultures that are in the cabinets.
• Each floor has a lunch room with floor-to-ceiling glass walls featuring spectacular views of the Bay Bridge and downtown skyline. Furniture includes blonde wood tables and one sofa per room.

• The plaza on the west side, or back, of the building is approximately 24,000 square feet in size, just over half an acre. It’s intended to be pleasant, relaxing, elegant and understated while remaining compatible with and complementary to the building itself.
• San Francisco-based Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture designed the space, which features ornamental grasses, zelkova trees (reminiscent of American Elm but more disease-resistant) and Jacarandas, along with trumpet vine along a west perimeter fence to create an intriguing mix of plant sizes, shapes and textures.
• Paving materials include creative uses of granite blocks and beige-colored decomposed granite.
• Commercial developers who own adjoining property have plans in place to adopt many of the plaza’s characteristics for their future adjacent developments.

• The Gladstone building has been granted the California Public Utilities Commission’s “Savings by Design” designation for overall energy efficiency.
• The building’s energy use is more than 20% below California 2001 Energy Code requirements (excluding a limited number of specific, contained lab process systems)
• Demand Control Ventilation sensors in the building’s 150-seat auditorium modulate ventilation based on changing CO2 levels
• The building features a High-Performance Glazing System (Viracon Solarscreen). This is double-paned, laminated exterior glass that provides built-in shading as well as much greater insulation than single-paned glass
• Extensive use of motion sensors for lighting control in all areas of the building
• The building features a Lighting Power Density of only 0.92 watts per square foot
• General recycling (paper, glass, plastic) goes on throughout the building
• Lab recycling of such materials as pipette tip boxes (plastic) and media bottles (plastic and glass) takes place in all of the building’s labs
• The building features Variable Frequency Drives (VFD's) for some of the larger mechanical building equipment. Such drives feature sensors with feedback control to adjustable-frequency drives, changing the capacity of pumps and related equipment to match changing needs
• Utilization of secondary and tertiary filtration measures for hood exhausts
• Variable-Speed Chiller System with variable primary pumping system

UNBONDED BRACES TO RESIST SEISMIC FORCES

This project is the first privately owned building in San Francisco to use unbonded braces to resist seismic forces.

Background:

Because they are a cost-effective means of resisting seismic forces and controlling lateral displacements, steel-braced frames are used in situations where buildings may be subjected to severe ground shaking during an earthquake. However, past earthquakes and recent research have identified a number of potential problems with steel-braced frames using conventional buckling braces.

Recent research in the U.S. and Japan has led to the development of commercially available braces that avoid the problems associated with conventional buckling braces. Known as buckling-restrained braces, they are characterized by being able to resist the high compressive forces associated with earthquakes without buckling out of plane. Analyses and tests of buckling-restrained braces indicate that they are more robust than conventional buckling braces. Analyses of complete structures suggest that buckling-restrained braces can substantially improve overall system behavior.

Because of the benefit of better-than-code behavior during an earthquake, project structural engineers Rutherford & Chekene proposed unbonded braces, a subset of buckling-restrained braced frames, for the Gladstone Institutes facility’s seismic force resisting system. Analyses conducted on the building by Rutherford & Chekene and laboratory tests conducted by Nippon Steel Corporation, witnessed by Rutherford & Chekene, confirmed the positive behavior expected of the unbonded braces. These analyses and experiments underwent peer review by two different third-party structural engineers and the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection before being incorporated into the new Gladstone Institutes facility.

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