Foundry Square

• 1. Introduction

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  Foundry Square sits at Howard and First Streets in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, four 10-story buildings arranged so that each one claims a different corner of the same intersection. Together they total 1,200,000 square feet of interior space. Yet as of May 2023, two of those four towers were very nearly empty. One of them, Foundry Square III at 505 Howard Street, stood at a 97.6% vacancy rate. The San Francisco Chronicle called what was happening around them downtown San Francisco's worst office vacancy crisis on record. How did a complex designed to define a neighborhood's public life end up so hollowed out? And what does the architecture itself tell us about what the project was always trying to do?

• 2. A Design in Four Parts

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  STUDIOS Architecture, Jim Jennings Architecture, Page and Turnbull, and landscape architect SWA Group each contributed to the design of Foundry Square, with Webcor Builders leading construction. The developer behind the project was Wilson Equity Office, now known as Wilson Meany. What bound the four buildings together visually was an unbroken band of dual-glaze glass walls, each face running 200 feet. Those walls frame the open corners of the intersection, where the buildings pull back to create an arcade, a sheltered transition zone between the indoor office world and the street. The glazing work was carried out by AGA, Architectural Glass and Aluminum.

  At the center of that transition sits roughly 1,000 square feet of shared public space, formed by the four open corners combined. SWA Group filled that space with tree bosques, over-scaled pots, and ground-floor cafes. Richard Deutsch contributed a stainless steel sculpture called Time Signature, one of several pieces of public art integrated across the intersection. The project earned SWA Group the ASLA Northern California Chapter Merit Award in 2006, recognizing the landscape design that turned four separate building footprints into a single readable place.

• 3. Phases of Construction

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  Foundry Square came together in three distinct waves spread across more than a decade. The first phase delivered two buildings simultaneously: Foundry Square II at 405 Howard Street and Foundry Square IV at 500 Howard Street, both completed in 2003. Foundry Square I at 400 Howard Street followed in 2007, filling a third corner of the intersection.

  The fourth building took longer. In April 2012, Tishman Speyer acquired the entitlements for Foundry Square III at 505 Howard Street from Wilson Meany Sullivan, then broke ground later that same year. Foundry Square III was completed in April 2014, closing the final corner of the block and finishing what the original design had always envisioned as a unified public square. The gap between the first phase and the last building's completion stretched eleven years.

• 4. Who Moved In

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  Law firm Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe took space in the complex, joining STUDIOS Architecture, which chose to locate its own offices inside a building it had helped design. Slack made Foundry Square its headquarters, occupying the complex during the years when the messaging platform grew into a major technology company. The NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center also established a presence there, adding an institutional dimension to what was otherwise a mix of legal, design, and technology tenants. The location near the Salesforce Transit Center placed Foundry Square at a transportation hub, making the complex well-positioned for companies expecting employees to commute from around the Bay Area.

• 5. The Vacancy Crisis

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  By May 2023, the four buildings told sharply different stories. Foundry Square II at 405 Howard Street had a vacancy rate of just 1.6%, essentially full. Foundry Square I at 400 Howard Street sat at 36.9% vacant. But the two buildings completed most recently presented a stark contrast. Foundry Square IV at 500 Howard Street, one of the original 2003 phase buildings, reached 95.4% vacancy. Foundry Square III at 505 Howard Street, finished in April 2014, reached 97.6%.

  The San Francisco Chronicle framed what surrounded these numbers as downtown San Francisco's worst office vacancy crisis on record. The variation across the four buildings, ranging from nearly occupied to nearly abandoned within the same architectural complex, shows that the crisis did not land evenly even on adjacent properties sharing the same design language and the same street corner.