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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 5:09 PM
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The Salesforce Tower will stand for centuries, but the employees are gone

A friend/former co-worker of mine, who grew up in Berkeley, posted this article on his facebook...

From SFGate:

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

Andrew Chamings | on March 30, 2021

The disembodied demonic eye watched over turbulent, changing lands. It was said that few could endure its terrible, omnipotent gaze.

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 — put your name on 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 the majority of your workforce will no longer be working in S.F. offices full time ever again. 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.

Link: https://www.sfgate.com/local/amp/sal...GtNKmy_-t54Tbc


Photo: Thomas Winz
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 5:16 PM
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Yikes... talk about over dramatic. The employees will be back, and the park, pre-COVID, was lit. I'm not sure who this guy was texting but most people I know either like the tower or are indifferent.

To me, the only real shame is that it overshadows the true gem next to it, 181 Fremont.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 5:30 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by homebucket View Post
Yikes... talk about over dramatic. The employees will be back, and the park, pre-COVID, was lit. I'm not sure who this guy was texting but most people I know either like the tower or are indifferent.

To me, the only real shame is that it overshadows the true gem next to it, 181 Fremont.
An interesting commentary nonetheless, I thought.

I see the ironies he's pointing out; and funny enough, there's even irony in the irony he's pointing out. San Francisco was indeed a center of the counterculture movement, but basically from the Gold Rush era, San Francisco has always been about Yankee capitalism, and for a long time was always *the* center of finance on the west coast, beginning back from even before LA was just an oil/movie/agricultural town and Seattle was just a working-class lumber town.

I miss the San Francisco of 25 years ago, when it felt more funky and creative and less mainstream and corporate. But it has come full circle, it seems.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 5:49 PM
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Originally Posted by sopas ej View Post
An interesting commentary nonetheless, I thought.

I see the ironies he's pointing out; and funny enough, there's even irony in the irony he's pointing out. San Francisco was indeed a center of the counterculture movement, but basically from the Gold Rush era, San Francisco has always been about Yankee capitalism, and for a long time was always *the* center of finance on the west coast, beginning back from even before LA was just an oil/movie/agricultural town and Seattle was just a working-class lumber town.

I miss the San Francisco of 25 years ago, when it felt more funky and creative and less mainstream and corporate. But it has come full circle, it seems.
Ironic indeed.

The soulless take is interesting because I don't really see how tech lacks soul compared to any other traditional industry. Is tech any more corporate than finance and banking, SF's prior top fields? Do suit wearing bankers somehow have more soul than Patagonia clad techies? Tech in some ways IS the counter culture to the rigid, hierarchical structures of finance. Is the argument that SF should've stagnated its economy and not diversified with tech? Is the author longing to go back to the Gold Rush era?
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 5:58 PM
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I also thought it was overly melodramatic.

One thing I'll say is that we have less and less of this kind of "hear me rant" journalism. Maybe it's a generational thing?
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 6:19 PM
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We do not build things to stand for centuries.

If this building is to last for more than 150 years it will require massive retrofitting to keep from collapsing.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 6:20 PM
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Originally Posted by homebucket View Post
Yikes... talk about over dramatic. The employees will be back, and the park, pre-COVID, was lit. I'm not sure who this guy was texting but most people I know either like the tower or are indifferent.

To me, the only real shame is that it overshadows the true gem next to it, 181 Fremont.
Confirmation bias is a strange beast. When things are good people have trouble imagining them being bad, when things are bad people have a hard time imagining them being good.

Its the way we are as humans.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 6:25 PM
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^That's what they said about the Eiffel Tower.

Anyway, I thought Salesforce had bitten the dust and gone under from the doom and gloom of that article as if I'd missed something.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 6:45 PM
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Originally Posted by homebucket View Post
Ironic indeed.

The soulless take is interesting because I don't really see how tech lacks soul compared to any other traditional industry. Is tech any more corporate than finance and banking, SF's prior top fields? Do suit wearing bankers somehow have more soul than Patagonia clad techies? Tech in some ways IS the counter culture to the rigid, hierarchical structures of finance. Is the argument that SF should've stagnated its economy and not diversified with tech? Is the author longing to go back to the Gold Rush era?
^ Tech definitely has no soul.

Spending all day sitting in front of a laptop is soooo not sexy or full of personality, I don't care how you dress.

When I think of "soul" in a corporate sense, what comes to mind is those traders in the film The Wolf on Wall St.

And tech has even sucked the soul out of that industry. Tech is the OPPOSITE of soul. If soul is MATTER, then tech is ANTI-MATTER. There is nothing soulful about tech. Tech is anti-human. It degrades our species in every way.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 6:57 PM
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Whatever, that building is so gorgeous in person, my office is about a block or so away at 560 Mission and everytime I walk out of our bldg I always find myself looking at Salesforce
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 7:06 PM
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It’s a beautiful tower and I hope people will soon be back to work.

It gives San Francisco a futuristic Star Trek quality, very nice addition to the skyline.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 7:18 PM
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Oh the horror

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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 7:27 PM
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I like the Salesforce Tower, even if I don't care for the name or the company (and honestly, my experience with them are minimal).

I'm also a sucker for Pelli (RIP).
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 7:44 PM
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I like the tower too, and I love the park. I think it's the best part of the building.

The tower is quite striking from a distance, but the only part I don't like about it is how parts of it meet the street; the ground-level walkway between the transit center and the tower feel like you're using a service entrance or something.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 7:56 PM
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Originally Posted by the urban politician View Post
^ Tech definitely has no soul.

Spending all day sitting in front of a laptop is soooo not sexy or full of personality, I don't care how you dress.

When I think of "soul" in a corporate sense, what comes to mind is those traders in the film The Wolf on Wall St.

And tech has even sucked the soul out of that industry. Tech is the OPPOSITE of soul. If soul is MATTER, then tech is ANTI-MATTER. There is nothing soulful about tech. Tech is anti-human. It degrades our species in every way.
I’m not saying tech is soulful. I just don’t see how it’s any different from any other industry? It’s a job. Is a salmon filleting plant more soulful?
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 7:57 PM
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Although this piece is not specifically about the San Francisco headquarters building, pretty much everything in it applies to that building--I've seen an interview on TV with Mark Benioff in which he said the same things about SF.

Quote:
'9-to-5 workday is dead': Salesforce won't require majority of workers to return to office
Alexandria Burris
Indianapolis Star

San Francisco-based Salesforce will not require the majority of its global workforce to return to the office full time after the novel coronavirus pandemic.

In a blog post, Salesforce president and chief people officer Brent Hyder said the company has adopted a Work From Anywhere approach that would give its tens of thousands of employees flexibility in how, when and where they work . . . .

"An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks," Hyder said in the post.

Under the Work From Anywhere approach, Salesforce said it would offer employees three types of work experiences in the post-COVID-19 environment when it's safe to work out of offices.

Most employees would work on flex schedules or part time from the office, meaning they'll be there one to three days per week, usually for team collaborations, meetings and presentations.

Employees who don't live near offices or have roles that require them to work out of one would be fully remote. And lastly, a small population of the company's global workforce would be office-based, spending four to five days per week at their offices if required.

Hyder, in the blog, said the approach is based on feedback gathered from employees early in the pandemic. That feedback guided the company's reopening strategy and how it would move forward.

"We learned that nearly half of our employees want to come in only a few times per month, but also that 80% of employees want to maintain a connection to a physical space," Hyder said . . . .

He added that the Work from Anywhere approach would help unlock new growth opportunities for the software company and expand its search for employee talent beyond traditional city centers.

Location would not be a barrier. Talent could be plucked from new communities and geographies.

The strategy also would allow employees to adopt more flexible work schedules to accommodate children or sick relatives.

"In our always-on, always-connected world, it no longer makes sense to expect employees to work an eight-hour shift and do their jobs successfully," Hyder said. "Whether you have a global team to manage across time zones, a project-based role that is busier or slower depending on the season, or simply have to balance personal and professional obligations throughout the day, workers need flexibility to be successful."

Not only is Salesforce reimagining how and when its employees work, it's also redesigning office space.

Hyder said Salesforce plans to revamp its office to function as community hubs that could accommodate a hybrid workstyle.

"Gone are the days of a sea of desks — we’ll create more collaboration and breakout spaces to foster the human connection that can’t be replicated remotely," he said in the post . . . .
https://www.indystar.com/story/money...ce/6701985002/

Given that Salesforce had full-building leases on 3 corners of the intersection at Mission and Fremont (including the eponymous tower) and had been in discussions for additional space in the Oceanwide Center and Parcel F tower, I think it's reasonable to expect that they'll consolidate in the iconic tower, probably forget about additional space in Oceanwide and Parcel F and probably sublease some space in the other buildings at Mission & Fremont. But those employees working several days a week in the office plus the ones working full time in the office will probably keep the Salesforce Tower well occupied.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 8:01 PM
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Originally Posted by the urban politician View Post
^ Tech definitely has no soul.

Spending all day sitting in front of a laptop is soooo not sexy or full of personality, I don't care how you dress.

When I think of "soul" in a corporate sense, what comes to mind is those traders in the film The Wolf on Wall St.

And tech has even sucked the soul out of that industry. Tech is the OPPOSITE of soul. If soul is MATTER, then tech is ANTI-MATTER. There is nothing soulful about tech. Tech is anti-human. It degrades our species in every way.
I think you don't "get" tech.

Most of the tech in San Francisco is software and a lot of that (Salesforce not included) is gaming software. The employees don't sit in front of computers all day. Much of the day is spent in groups or individually with other employees "brainstorming". How is what the traders in WOWS were doing (cold calling and cheating clients) any more "soulful" than thinking up a new way for you to kill opponents spewing as much fake blood as possible on a screen?

These are images of one SF tech company's--AirBnB--new offices:












All images: https://www.dezeen.com/2017/10/03/ai...san-francisco/

This is pretty much the direction Salesforce and the rest are going too: Spaces for employees to assemble comfortably with each other and cross-fertilize ideas. There are a few computer screens visible, but they are not the focus of most spaces or most employee time.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 8:05 PM
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Originally Posted by dimondpark View Post
Whatever, that building is so gorgeous in person, my office is about a block or so away at 560 Mission and everytime I walk out of our bldg I always find myself looking at Salesforce
That is where I work too; although I have not been to the office since March 12, 2020. Love the building and the park.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 8:08 PM
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Ironic indeed.

The soulless take is interesting because I don't really see how tech lacks soul compared to any other traditional industry. Is tech any more corporate than finance and banking, SF's prior top fields? Do suit wearing bankers somehow have more soul than Patagonia clad techies? Tech in some ways IS the counter culture to the rigid, hierarchical structures of finance. Is the argument that SF should've stagnated its economy and not diversified with tech? Is the author longing to go back to the Gold Rush era?
I didn't interpret the article as saying that tech lacks soul, but that the Salesforce Tower does. I can see why some people might say that; again, I like the way the tower looks from a distance against the skyline, but I can see why some people might call it "soul-less corporate architecture." That wouldn't be unique to this particular building; a lot of current corporate architecture looks like that.

Quote:
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Do suit wearing bankers somehow have more soul than Patagonia clad techies?
No, they don't. Neither do. And the fact that those techies might be all wearing Patagonia just emphasizes their sameness and how much into corporations they really are... kind of like the supposed "hip" techies that used to wear North Face but are now all into Columbia windbreakers---which to me is all mainstream corporate Karen-wear.
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Old Posted Mar 30, 2021, 8:14 PM
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^That's what they said about the Eiffel Tower.

Anyway, I thought Salesforce had bitten the dust and gone under from the doom and gloom of that article as if I'd missed something.
Not exactly. Here's the consensus per-share earnings forecasts:


Fidelity.com
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