MIRA Tower (160 Folsom Street): A look behind the scenes at the making of a new San Francisco icon.

MIRA is an urban residential development in the heart of San Francisco. Just blocks from the Bay Bridge, Embarcadero, and Rincon Park, the 400-foot-tall tower creates a welcoming new community in the evolving Transbay district and accommodates a wide range of units, with 40 percent designated below market rate.  

The design responds to the need for dense housing in San Francisco and offers new models of sustainability, all while reinterpreting the city’s architectural traditions. It evolves the classic bay window, a familiar feature of San Francisco’s early houses, reimagining it in a high-rise context.

Twisting incrementally over the height of the tower, the bays offer ample views, natural light throughout the day, and fresh air, and also inform the building’s distinctive form and texture—the result of special attention to the building’s energy performance and how it is experienced. Extending the inhabitable spaces within and offering platforms from which to view the city at all angles, the bays make every residence a corner unit.

Permasteelisa handled the fabrication and installation of the facade, wrapping up a floor approximately every four days. In total, there are over 4,700 curtainwall panels. (Jason O’Rear)

A sophisticated curtain wall facade system allows the bays to be attached to a repeatable structural slab from inside the building, reducing the need for a tower crane on site and limiting energy consumption and neighborhood impact during construction. The bays allow for a high-performance facade that is 55 percent opaque without inhibiting nearly 180-degree-views in every unit. The high-performance facade, along with an innovative VRF cooling system, allows the building to exceed ambitious California Title 24 energy standards. This, along with a state-of-the-art graywater harvesting system, green roofs, and high-efficiency fixtures, puts the project on target for LEED Gold certification.

Studio Gang Architects, with the collaboration from Heintges, developed 10 different bay unit types for the facade. Each is an isosceles triangle with consistent widths and varying depths. (Courtesy Studio Gang Architects)

© Jason O’Rear