A pair of cracked windows have been discovered at San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower. It’s another stroke of bad luck for the city’s newest architectural marvels.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that local Department of Building Inspection officials confirmed the presence of cracked window panes in the 61-story, Pelli Clarke Pelli-designed tower last week. The cracks were discovered along the inner panes of a dual-glazed, south-facing window on the 12th floor and a similar east-facing window on the 14th floor of the tower.
A spokesperson for the building’s owner told CBS in San Francisco that because the cracks are located on the inside of the window assembly, the damage poses no danger of falling glass. The cause for the cracks has not been discovered, but plans are underway to replace the affected windows in the coming weeks.
The Salesforce Tower opened in January 2018 and is currently San Francisco’s tallest building. At 1,070 feet in height, the building is considered the second tallest structure in the western United States behind Los Angeles’s Wilshire Grand tower.
The discovery of cracked windows at Salesforce comes months after broken window panes were discovered in the Handel Architects-designed Millennium Tower just one block over. The 58-story tower has settled over 18 inches on one side and is also leaning by 14 inches, according to recent reports. The settling is believed to have caused the cracked windows discovered last year at the tower. Plans for a $100 million fix to stop the sinking are currently under development. Those efforts include drilling up to 300 new micro-piles through the building’s foundation and into the bedrock below in an effort to stabilize the tower. The tower opened in 2009 and cost about $350 million to build.
Another new San Francisco project, the Transbay Transit Center, located at the base of the Salesforce Tower, remains closed nearly six months after a pair of cracked structural beams were discovered in that building. A permanent fix for the damaged beams is currently underway, though a reopening date for the transit center has yet to be announced. Officials with the Transbay Joint Powers Authority blame manufacturing defects for the damaged beams.
These troubles come as news of the city’s precarious subsoils and the potential earthquake risk for certain high-rise towers are brought to light as well.
