San Francisco, CA
499 Illinois Street
Scope/Solutions
The 499 Illinois Street project in Mission Bay is a 500,000 sq ft biotechnology center in two buildings with laboratory, office, retail, and parking. SGH provided structural and building enclosure engineering services for the project that consists of two five-story buildings over two levels of parking with flanking retail and office spaces at grade level.
Highlights of SGH’s work for this project include the following:
- Developed an innovative foundation system incorporating steel H-piles set in an auger-cast secant wall that integrates grouts of two different strength and functions as a shoring wall, a permanent foundation wall, a below-grade groundwater cutoff wall, and a waterproofing barrier
- Incorporated a seismic force resisting system with buckling-restrained braces and composite concrete-encased steel columns designed using nonlinear response-history analysis
- Designed floors to limit walking-induced vibration to 2,000 micro-inches per second
- Designed a mat foundation that was placed in a continuous fourteen hour effort that involved an 11,000 cu yd, monolithic placement of concrete to minimize potential for water intrusion and reduce construction cost
- Designed and observed waterproofing installation below-grade, raised plaza, balconies and roofs
- Provided performance criteria and third-party commissioning for design-build curtain walls
Project Summary
Solutions
New Construction
Services
Building Enclosures | Structures
Markets
Commercial
Client(s)
DGA planning | architecture | interiors
Specialized Capabilities
Building Design | Temporary Construction | Geotechnical | Commissioning | Facades & Glazing | Roofing & Waterproofing
Key team members



Additional Projects
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SGH was retained by prospective owners to identify seismic vulnerabilities and develop conceptual retrofits and cost estimates for the hotel. After the building was purchased, SGH designed a seismic retrofit.
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Warner Bros. Studios, Glass Building
The Glass Building is a four-story office building built over a parking structure. SGH investigated the causes of curtain wall failure.