360 Spear Street

San Francisco, california

As part of MCIWorldcom’s expansion in 2000, 100 Harrison/ 360 Spear became a central switch facility for Worldcom as well as AT&T. The original building was built circa 1932 as part of a Navy Warehouse in advance of the preparation of World War II. In 1999, the new owner/developer proceeded to market the building as a “Data Center” when Worldcom took it over.

PARADIGM was engaged to design the seismic rehabilitation to the building to the desired standards of a new Data Center, to achieve “immediate occupancy” as a result of a design level event. As part of the retrofit, PARADIGM had to demolish recently installed shear wall elements from a previous seismic upgrade that did not achieve the immediate occupancy performance objective.

PARADIGM performed a rehabilitation that considered site specific seismic demands on the existing building and retrofitted the building to achieve the desired immediate occupancy performance objective by installing ductile reinforced shear walls along the perimeter and at discrete locations within the building. Additionally, in order to maintain vertical alignment and overturning resistance, over 150 micro-piles were installed. These micro-piles varied in length from 120’ along the spear street face, to 30’ along the rear of the building.

Of particular note was that PARADIGM encouraged the incorporation of Base Isolation for this facility and the owner elected to stay with a conventional system, while immediately south, “Above Net” retrofitted an existing building incorporating Base Isolation and it remains one of the Preeminent Data Centers in the United States.