Yea, it's ugly...

The Salesforce Tower will stand for centuries, but the employees are gone

Andrew Chamings

When the digitized Eye of Sauron beamed out over San Francisco from atop the Salesforce Tower on Halloween 2018 some people thought it was cool, but the joke always struck me as too close to the bone.

When you’ve built a corporate monolith that forever changes how the city looks and feels, in the name of big tech, are you allowed to be in on the joke? A joke about an evil soulless monstrosity sucking the life out of all those in its viewshed?

It felt like a dirty wink from the tech giant to the little people — hey, we’re funny too. We have memed. Sorry about the cost of living lol.

Here’s another funny joke — build the most obtrusive and expensive thing San Francisco has ever seen, as the biggest private employer in the city … then three years later announce that your workers will be working from home, forever. Zing.

Building the tallest building in a city to show your success was a common 20th century pissing match, fought by men with egos the size of their blueprints. It was even considered gauche when newspaper and sugar magnates tried to outbuild each other in San Francisco in the 1890s, and it took an earthquake to end that ego-off. These days it's more normal to donate enough money to get your name on a hospital instead, but the Salesforce Tower isn't normal.

In the early 2000s it was decided that a 16-block neglected area of SoMa known as the Transbay District should be updated to improve the transit systems and surroundings. After a global competition to entitle and purchase the site in 2007, Argentine American architect César Pelli was selected to design the tower. Ground on Mission Street was broken in 2013, and a few years later it became the tallest thing in the city, surpassing the Transamerica Pyramid by more than 200 feet.

As the anchor tenant, Salesforce got naming rights before it opened (it was previously known as the Transbay Tower). The company also forked out $110 million to put their name on the neighboring Salesforce Transit Center, a move the SFMTA director called “distasteful.”

Reviews at the time were mostly underwhelming. Critics decried it as an inappropriate Manhattanization of San Francisco. The Chronicle’s design critic John King remarked on its “air of detachment, as if the creators were so busy being tasteful they forgot that big buildings can be fun.” The nicest thing he could add was “you might come to like it more than you expect.”

The tower lacked any risk or ambition in design and so made up for it in sheer size, somehow managing to be obnoxious without any swagger.

San Francisco is no stranger to controversial changes to its skyline. The Transamerica Pyramid was despised by most before being accepted and later loved. And the tower is certainly not as ugly as the Embarcadero Freeway, though that abomination was so hated it was torn down to much celebration (and a performance by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus) in 1991.

One of the weirdest pitches in building the tower was that it would help civic neighborhood life on the block, in the same way that a freeway helps a deer.

As anyone who has strolled around Mission and First knows, that didn’t happen. The streets shrouded under swaths of deep blue opaque glass at the fat end of the steely shaft do not provide a pleasant neighborhood stroll.

One of the strangest things about the tower is that, due to its wholly unnecessary height and location, there are some spots around the bay where San Francisco was always out of view, but now ONLY the Salesforce Tower is visible.

Strolling by the cliffs at Land’s End, driving out of SFO, hiking the western slope of Mount Diablo. From these vantage points the tip of the tower is now part of the horizon, while no other buildings creep into view.

An Instagram account, JustTheTipSF, highlights this phenomenon and has received more than 1,000 photo submissions of distant views that were once sky, and now are speared by glass. (Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once tweeted a link to the website before deleting it, maybe realizing that the site wasn’t celebrating his tower but mocking its omnipresent phallic appearance.)

Despite all the jokes, I don’t see the Salesforce Tower as a dick exactly, more an ill-fitting appendage, a strap-on pegging the beautiful California sky.

The tower in no way complements the existing skyline. The group of downtown structures used to form an aesthetically pleasing block, especially when approaching from the Bay Bridge or where I-80 crosses 7th Street, that’s now been unceremoniously dwarfed, leaving downtown San Francisco looking like an old broomhead with a glassy handle.

Beyond lacking a figurative soul, that looming Goliath now lacks literal souls, too.

The tower is built to stand for two centuries or more, but just a few years after the skyscraper at 415 Mission was completed, Salesforce — the tower’s largest lessee with 714,000 square feet of office space — announced that the majority of its workforce will no longer be working there, or in any S.F. offices, ever again.

The name Salesforce will mean nothing in decades time. The tech giant specializes in cloud computing and customer relationship management software. As with all tech sectors, that industry will be defunct centuries before the tower comes down. (Anyone remember what the Transamerica Corporation, of the pyramid six blocks north of the Salesforce Tower, does?)

And are there two words more antithetical to San Francisco, once the epicenter of the counterculture revolution and a hive of progressive ideals, than “Sales” and “Force”?

Even if the name does become as indelible as the tower, do we need a looming reminder of this fraught tech takeover era of the city?

San Franciscans are left with a phallic scar of a polarizing time in the city’s history of prohibitively expensive housing and culture wars. A 1,000-foot-high manifestation of Google Glass dive bar fights, artisanal gyms, Crypto Castle Lamborghinis and very expensive toast.

I’m no architect, but buildings are not built to be enjoyed by architects, like movies aren’t made to be watched by directors. It only matters what those living under its shadow think, so I texted a bunch of San Franciscans to sum up their opinion in one sentence.

I was hoping to turn it into a fun infographic based on their responses but the pie chart would literally be a full circle of “meh.”

Responses included, “Yeah, I hate it,” “Why is it so f—king big?” “It’s dumb and stupid and takes up too much space,” “It should be in Dubai,” “dildo-esque,” “Why do they play movies on it, no one is watching a movie on a tower” and “I think the roof is broken.”

One thing’s for sure, no one loves the Salesforce Tower, except maybe the people that worked there, who had access to the Ohana Floor with its living walls and Hawaiian-themed stuffed goats; and the elevated five-block-long park named, um, Salesforce Park. (Salesforce Park sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center, next to Salesforce Plaza, under Salesforce Tower. Sales. Force.)

Below the lush and artsy raised park is a cavernous empty space, slated to one day house California's high-speed rail, if that ever happens, but now mostly provides shelter for unhoused people. The park insists it is open to the public, but it’s unclear whether unhoused people are allowed to enter the elevators that provide the only access.

Salesforce couldn’t have predicted the pandemic-fueled move to remote work, and they’re not the only ones with acres of vacant offices. In fact, there are now almost 16 million square feet of vacant office space in San Francisco, more than 11 Salesforce Towers' worth. But those other companies didn’t plant a 1,000-foot obelisk in the middle of our city.

When you do find yourself on that Mount Diablo hike, or driving up the Peninsula and see that surreal lonely tip spearing the blue, what exactly are you looking at? It’s not a city, it’s not a skyline, it’s not the sky anymore. It’s the uncanny valley where ego meets the clouds, and it’s definitely not San Francisco.