The Shell Building is an office tower in the
Financial District
A financial district is usually a central area in a city where financial services firms such as banks, insurance companies and other related finance corporations have their head offices. In major cities, financial districts are often home to s ...
of
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
,
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
. The 28-story, , building is located at 100 Bush Street, at Battery Street. It was designed by
George W. Kelham
George William Kelham (1871–1936) was an American architect, he was most active in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Biography
Born in Manchester, Massachusetts, Kelham was educated at Harvard University and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Art ...
and built in 1929, in the architectural style of
Gothic Moderne,
Moderne and
Art Deco
Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...
.
Shell Oil Company
Shell USA, Inc. (formerly Shell Oil Company, Inc.) is the United States-based wholly owned subsidiary of Shell plc, a UK-based transnational corporation " oil major" which is amongst the largest oil companies in the world. Approximately 18,000 ...
occupied the building until the 1960s. There are castings of shells that decorate the
cornice
In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...
on the upper levels as well as shell designs in the lobby floor and decorative grill at the front of the building.
A renovation by
Heller Manus Architects Heller Manus Architects, founded in 1984, is a San Francisco, California-based architecture firm providing architectural, master planning, and urban design services for public and private sector clients. Jeffrey Heller, FAIA is the founding principa ...
won the San Francisco Architectural Heritage Award in 1994.
Shell Building Renovation
. Heller Manus Architects. Accessed 25 March 2021.
See also
*Eliel Saarinen's Tribune Tower design
Eliel Saarinen's Tribune Tower design or the Saarinen tower are terms used to describe the unnamed and unbuilt design for a modernist skyscraper, created by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen and submitted in 1922 for the ''Chicago Tribune''s arch ...
*List of tallest buildings in San Francisco
San Francisco, California, in the United States, has at least 482 high-rises, 58 of which are at least tall. The tallest building is Salesforce Tower, which rises and is the 17th-tallest building in the United States. The city's second- ...
References
External links
Shell Building website
Office buildings completed in 1929
Skyscraper office buildings in San Francisco
Shell plc buildings and structures
Art Deco architecture in California
Financial District, San Francisco
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