Herzog & de Meuron are transforming a former Power Station, a building from the beginning of the 20th century that supplied energy to the city, in San Francisco Bay. The project was designed in collaboration with California-based practice Adamson Associates, as part of the Portrero Power Station project, in the Dogpatch neighborhood, an industrial site of 29-acre,  that includes parks, offices, residential buildings.

Herzog & de Meuron’s design retains and repurposes various features of the brick industrial building of the old dismantled power plant that will largely preserve the turbine room, while adding a lightweight, steel-framed structure on top will be built that will allow flooded the interior spaces  with natural light.
The Power Station project, in which the Herzog & de Meuron team is involved, is a future mainly residential, mixed-use neighborhood with approximately 2,600 new homes. The new neighborhood opens up with a large industrial chimney with open spaces and parks, a boutique hotel adapted to one of the power stations, known as "Station A", as well as shops and restaurants, all organized around the seafront promenade.

The redevelopment of "Station A", designed by Herzog & de Meuron on the former industrial site by the bay, is based on the reuse of an early 20th-century brick power station, which aims to make the best of the industrial past and infuse it with what the community needs and wants in the 21st century.

The process is careful, the turbine hall will be retained for the most part, while the large concrete foundations of the turbines will support the new steel structure above, becoming programmed spaces.

The platforms that were occupied by machinery years ago will now house meeting spaces overlooking the open turbine hall, showing a continued connection and respect for the pre-existing.  

The external cantilevers, together with natural ventilation strategies and the simple and efficient structure of the upper extension contribute to the goal of sustainable reuse of this relic of heavy industry.

In this way, the Swiss studio succeeds in giving a new life to the building of the city's picturesque past and will position this area as a unique destination on the San Francisco waterfront.
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Architects
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Herzog & de Meuron Team Partners.- Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Jason Frantzen (Partner in Charge), Simon Demeuse.
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Project team
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Maximilian Beckenbauer (Associate, Project Director), Ryan Cole (Project Manager), Marion Achach, Alessandro Arcangeli, Iwona Boguslawska, Carly Dean, Josh Ehrlich, Ahmed Fetahu, Carly Gertler, Ciarán Grogan, Josh Helin, Brandon Lawry, Richard Nelson-Chow.
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Project team concept phase
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Maximilian Beckenbauer (Associate, Project Director), Ryan Cole (Project Manager), Bruno de Almeida Martins, Carla Ferrando, Brandon Lawry, David Goncalves Monteiro, Richard Nelson-Chow, Alexander Pearson, Matteo Zapparoli.
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Collaborators
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Design Consultant.- Herzog & de Meuron, Basel, Switzerland. Executive Architect.- Adamson Associates, Inc., Los Angeles, CA, USA.
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Client
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California Barrel Company LLC, San Francisco, CA, USA.
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Area
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Site Area.- 47,000 sqf. Gross Floor Area (GFA).- 430,000 sqf.
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Localización
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San Francisco, CA, USA.
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Herzog & de Meuron Architekten is a Swiss architecture firm, founded and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland in 1978. The careers of founders and senior partners Jacques Herzog (born 1950), and Pierre de Meuron (born 1950), closely paralleled one another, with both attending the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. They are perhaps best known for their conversion of the giant Bankside Power Station in London to the new home of the Tate Museum of Modern Art (2000). Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have been visiting professors at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 1994 (and in 1989) and professors at ETH Zürich since 1999. They are co-founders of the ETH Studio Basel – Contemporary City Institute, which started a research programme on processes of transformation in the urban domain.

Herzog & de Meuron is a partnership led by five Senior Partners – Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Christine Binswanger, Ascan Mergenthaler and Stefan Marbach. An international team of 38 Associates and about 362 collaborators.

Herzog & de Meuron received international attention very early in their career with the Blue House in Oberwil, Switzerland (1980); the Stone House in Tavole, Italy (1988); and the Apartment Building along a Party Wall in Basel (1988).  The firm’s breakthrough project was the Ricola Storage Building in Laufen, Switzerland (1987).  Renown in the United States came with Dominus Winery in Yountville, California (1998). The Goetz Collection, a Gallery for a Private Collection of Modern Art in Munich (1992), stands at the beginning of a series of internationally acclaimed museum buildings such as the Küppersmühle Museum for the Grothe Collection in Duisburg, Germany (1999). Their most recognized buildings include Prada Aoyama in Tokyo, Japan (2003); Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany (2005); the new Cottbus Library for the BTU Cottbus, Germany (2005); the National Stadium Beijing, the Main Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China; VitraHaus, a building to present Vitra’s “Home Collection“, Weil am Rhein, Germany (2010); and 1111 Lincoln Road, a multi-storey mixed-use structure for parking, retail, a restaurant and a private residence in Miami Beach, Florida, USA (2010), the Actelion Business Center in Allschwil/Basel, Switzerland (2010). In recent years, Herzog & de Meuron have also completed projects such as the New Hall for Messe Basel Switzerland (2013), the Ricola Kräuterzentrum in Laufen (2014), which is the seventh building in a series of collaborations with Ricola, with whom Herzog & de Meuron began to work in the 1980s; and the Naturbad Riehen (2014), a public natural swimming pool. In April 2014, the practice completed its first project in Brazil: the Arena do Morro in the neighbourhood of Mãe Luiza, Natal, is the pioneering project within the wider urban proposal “A Vision for Mãe Luiza”.

Herzog & de Meuron have completed 6 projects since the beginning of 2015: a new mountain station including a restaurant on top of the Chäserrugg (2262 metres above sea level) in Toggenburg, Switzerland; Helsinki Dreispitz, a residential development and archive in Münchenstein/Basel, Switzerland; Asklepios 8 – an office building on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland; the Slow Food Pavilion for Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy; the new Bordeaux stadium, a 42’000 seat multifunctional stadium for Bordeaux, France; Miu Miu Aoyama, a 720 m² boutique for the Prada-owned brand located on Miyuki Street, across the road from Prada Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan.

In many projects the architects have worked together with artists, an eminent example of that practice being the collaboration with Rémy Zaugg, Thomas Ruff and with Michael Craig-Martin.

Professionally, the Herzog & de Meuron partnership has grown to become an office with over 120 people worldwide. In addition to their headquarters in Basel, they have offices in London, Munich and San Francisco. Herzog has explained, “We work in teams, but the teams are not permanent. We rearrange them as new projects begin. All of the work results from discussions between Pierre and me, as well as our other partners, Harry Gugger and Christine Binswanger. The work by various teams may involve many different talents to achieve the best results which is a final product called architecture by Herzog & de Meuron.”

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Published on: June 8, 2021
Cite: "Herzog and de Meuron to Renovate Station A of Former San Francisco Power Plant" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/herzog-and-de-meuron-renovate-station-a-former-san-francisco-power-plant> ISSN 1139-6415
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