Uber – Highly transparent facades in seismic prone region

The new headquarter of Uber, designed by SHoP Architects, for a total of up to 3.000 employees is located in the Mission Bay neighbourhood of San Francisco (USA). The project's goal is to bring this developing stretch of Mission Bay into step with the successful, human‐scaled urban environments for which San Francisco is famous. Key to that goal is the “inside‐out” design of the two central cubic six and eleven‐story tall elements with transparent building envelopes. While developing and planning the sophisticated facade system the major challenge was implementation of high architectural demands to achieve a building envelope with a maximized transparency. Furthermore, a high ground acceleration due to the geographical location resulting in large seismic deformation and forces had to be considered during design of the facade structure.