700 Santana Row

Berkeley Commons is a four-story civic block at the edge of downtown Berkeley — equal parts public library, community gathering hall, and ground-floor retail. The structure had to do three contradictory things at once: span a 60-foot column-free assembly room, support a heavy green roof, and disappear behind a curtainwall thin enough to feel almost domestic at street level.

We engineered the lateral system around a series of buckling-restrained braces hidden inside the elevator core, fabricated a built-up girder line for the assembly span, and detailed every exposed connection — there are over 200 — for an Architecturally Exposed Structural Steel (AESS) Category 3 finish.

The site is tight. A neighbor on every property line, a transit-protected curb, and a contractor working three trades deep meant erection sequencing was as much of the deliverable as the steel itself. We pre-assembled four mega-trusses off-site at our Santa Clara shop and floated them in over two weekend lifts.