101 Second Street, Office skyscraper in Financial District, San Francisco, United States.
101 Second Street is a 26-story glass office tower in San Francisco's Financial District, with a facade made entirely of curtain wall glazing. The building opens onto a spacious atrium at street level that brings daylight into the interior and keeps the ground floor visible from the sidewalk.
The tower was completed in 2000 by the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, at a time when demand for office space in San Francisco was growing fast due to the technology boom. That period brought a wave of new construction to the Financial District that reshaped its skyline.
The ground floor lobby displays rotating works by local San Francisco artists, visible to anyone passing through without entering a dedicated space. This kind of art presence in a commercial building reflects a broader habit in downtown San Francisco of weaving creative work into everyday settings.
The building is a short walk from Montgomery Street BART station, making it easy to reach by subway from most parts of the city. Arriving on foot from that station, you pass through the heart of the Financial District along streets lined with other tall office buildings.
The tower was engineered to handle the kind of ground movement common in the San Francisco Bay Area, using structural systems that absorb seismic energy rather than resist it rigidly. This approach, sometimes called base isolation or flexible framing, is now standard for tall buildings in the region but was less common when the tower was built.
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