This All-Electric Workplace Building Celebrates the Beauty of the City

On a burgeoning corner in downtown San Jose, California, a 19-story office building with a sprawling average floor plate of 54,000 square feet could kill the city vibe. But Gensler San Francisco had a solution. Six of what senior associate and technical director Christopher Payne calls “solar canyons” are carved vertically into the structure, breaking up the mass of 200 Park and making the high-rise more respectful of its urban context. “They also provide scaled neighborhoods between them and give access to terraces that allow a tenant’s business unit to have its own character.” The double-height terraces, or “sky bridges,” offer each leasable floor three outdoor spaces with views over downtown and the valley and bring natural light into the core.

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Interior Design celebrates Gensler's 60th anniversary with this special section featuring Q&As and dozens of projects in four of the firm's practice areas including cities, health, workplace, and lifestyle. Check it out today.

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Inside, Gensler’s hospitality-inspired environments offer a warm counterbalance to its facade of embossed stainless steel. Ash-veneer paneling in the elevator lobby morphs into textural ceiling slats, while indirect lighting grazes a chiseled limestone feature wall. “As you go up, the finishes become more saturated and punchier,” Payne says. Rift-cut white oak envelops much of the fifth-floor fitness studio; colorful, curvy furnishings—turquoise Nanimarquina ottomans, an expansive Lemmy sectional from Jardan, Anthony Dickens’s Tekiò circular pendant fixture—add whimsy in the neighboring social club.

That’s not all. Totaling 1.4 million square feet, the LEED Gold–certified, all-electric building is the first project in California to use SpeedCore construction, where prefabricated steel-plate panels do double duty as concrete formwork and structural members. The system shaved off three months in construction and reduced wall thicknesses by 20 percent, adding valuable square footage inside.

BENEDICT TRANEL; BERT DEVITERBO; NAOMI MOTOMURA; BOB PERRY; MELISSA O’REAR; CHRISTOPHER PAYNE; STEPHEN KATZ; SHUANG XU; ANNA PERICAS; MARWA ISTANBULI.