Monthly Archives: September 2021

Facebook MPK 20

Forell | Elsesser provided structural design services for the recently opened Facebook West Campus project. The building includes an on-grade open parking area for approximately Forell | Elsesser Engineers provided structural design services for Facebook’s West Campus.  The building includes an on-grade open parking area for approximately 1,500 cars with additional space for bus drop-offs, loading docks, lobby access, and mechanical spaces.  The second story is an open office space that has an enclosed area of approximately 433,000 square feet.  The office area is one large continuous floor plate with discrete functional rooms fully contained in the volume of the office to provide restrooms, conference rooms, meeting rooms, and other functional and service spaces as well as a larger cafeteria/meeting space at one end of the plan. This project is LEED Gold certified.

Customized Solution

  • Lateral forces are resisted at both the office and garage levels by Buckling-Restrained Brace Frames (BRBF).  At each level, there are 66 frames with 2 braces per frame for a total of 132 braces with average brace capacities of 1100 kips.
  • The building’s signature feature is its undulating green roof, which includes over 300 full-size trees as well as shrubs, grasses, walking paths, outdoor cafes, and art pieces.  The roof also has a large event lawn capable of supporting up to 10,000 attendees.  To bring the experience of the green roof into the building, large pop-ups and sunken gardens provide natural light and views throughout the building’s interior.
  • Due to the over 480,000 sf footprint of the building, there was a need for many staircases to allow for vertical circulation.  This resulted in 20 exterior stairs, three interior feature stairs, and one exterior feature ramp.  All of these elements were designed for a combination of gravity loads, seismic loads, and inelastic seismic building drift.

Facebook MPK 21

Forell | Elsesser Engineers provided structural design services for the new Facebook MPK21 building. The building includes an on-grade open parking area for approximately 1750 cars, a second story open office space with an enclosed area of approximately 410,000 sf, a large mezzanine space, and a roof with heavily landscaped areas and multiple large skylight, lobby, MEP, and conference room structures. The design also includes many unique exterior stairs, light gauge steel “clusters,” a large courtyard with Redwood trees, and a large clearspan event space.

Customized Solution

  • The building’s green roof has 3.6 acres of undulating terrain and a half-mile meandering pathway among hundreds of full-size trees. The planting is occasionally interrupted by story-tall sawtooth skylights that bring plentiful natural light into the office below.
  • The town square gathering space houses two signature cafés and provides outdoor space complete with a grove of 40 foot tall redwood trees. The Salad Café is constructed of diagonal 18”x 18” glulam beams, columns, and braces and is clad in glass. The Biryani Café has jagged, stepping roofs and is supported by round tube steel columns and braces.
  • Among the building’s 35 uniquely designed stairs are three interior feature stairs, which incorporate unsupported switchbacks. To limit vibration and deflection under service conditions, the stairs have specially detailed connections that remained pinned under dead and live load but slide in a seismic event to accommodate inter-story drift.

San Francisco State University, George and Judy Marcus Hall for the Liberal and Creative Arts

Forell | Elsesser provided structural engineering services for the new 72,000 sq. ft, 4-story Liberal and Creative Arts Building. The building includes the Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts (BECA) program as well as some interdisciplinary lecture space. The project was conceived as a flexible learning and production environment for teaching electronic media capture, editing, and broadcast.

Customized Solution

  • The building includes two multi-story television studios, along with a TV newsroom, radio station, video post-production space, audio recording production, and post-production space, as well as flexible classroom space for the BECA program.
  • The building is targeting LEED Gold certification.

Facebook MPK 22

Forell | Elsesser Engineers provided structural engineering services for the new 460,000 sq. ft. four-story office building designed by Gehry Partners. The entire building has an open atrium space with various landscape balconies. The open space allowed for various individual floor plans to weave throughout the building. The building connects with neighboring Facebook campus buildings through multiple pedestrian bridges, which required extensive site work.

Customized Solution

  • The nearby parking garage is connected to the three above-grade levels of the office building with pedestrian bridges that have spans varying from forty to seventy feet. In collaboration with the architect, F|E designed fourteen full height stairs in the interior and exterior of the structure.
  • In addition, there is a four-hundred-foot-long pedestrian bridge with maximum clear spans of eighty feet that connects the second floor of the office building to an adjacent nearby structure.
  • The building’s first-floor elevation was built up to account for sea-level rise. There are bio-retention areas that hold water after stormwater events to reduce the impact on the stormwater system from peak runoff.
  • The atrium is lined with conference and huddle rooms that appear to defy gravity.  The freestanding structures are a combination of structural steel and light-gage framing, providing both structural and acoustical separations between floors.