Pacific Gas & Electric, Northern California’s large public utility company, owns four adjacent buildings at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco, among them its original historic headquarters. As Design Architect and Interior Designer we seismically rehabilitated the buildings, renovated 500,000 gsf of office space, and restored the historically valuable public spaces so that PG&E to obtain official status as a National Register Landmark for the building.

We completely refurbished the buildings’ historic public and ground floor spaces, while bringing contemporary technologies to those lobbies. A crucial architectural challenge was to preserve the historic façades and to design new walls with carefully placed openings that would provide adequate light and air in the new office spaces. Using modern materials and techniques that recall the original walls, we organized the openings to be both structurally rational and aesthetically compatible. We reorganized the interior spaces to create a 21st Century office facility.

Designed in close collaboration with the California SHPO and the Department of the Interior, this project received the largest federal tax credit of its day. Maintaining PG&E’s commitment to civic architecture, this restoration of an important civic landmark reveals, preserves, and interprets the history of the company within the City of San Francisco.