San Francisco, California, USA

Known for their innovative design approaches, Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects and Peter Logan Architect and Design have renovated the MacLac Building D, originally constructed in 1906, in San Francisco’s historical Showplace Square warehouse district spent most of its life as a paint and lacquer factory.

“Building D is a condensed part of a larger campus of redevelopment, comprising separate structures that were built at different times with different materials,” Peter Logan says.

“The overall project consists of roughly 100,000 square feet made up of three separate buildings; Building D was its building and parcel. The development timeline was longer than anticipated—approximately two years—hampered by slowdowns due to COVID.”

For its sustainable design, the project has recently received a 2023 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture, Design, and Urban Studies.

Employing strategies that preserved the industrial character of the original building, the team has introduced modern elements to meet current and future needs.

They began the project by demolishing the prior interior additions, which revealed the building’s original brick, wood, and steel bones and full volume.

After refurbishing these crucial architectural elements, the firm added state-of-the-art steel braces and diaphragms to ensure the structure’s seismic soundness for the next 100 years.

The architects also incorporated new structural ridge skylights overhead, allowing natural light to penetrate the space, and a king-post truss system to create a column-free interior.

Finally, to take advantage of the space’s height and new structural truss, the team specified the construction of a mezzanine level featuring cross-laminated timber, steel beams, and metal-mesh guardrails.

Accessed by a new stair and increasing the building’s leasable floor space by 2,555 square feet, it wraps the perimeter of the interior and floats above the ground floor, allowing the historical masonry to shine alongside new architectural details.

Project: MacLac – Rebirth of A Historic Paint Factory
Architects: Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects
Associate Architects: Peter Logan Architect and Design (PLAD)
Lead Architects: Kent Royle and Peter Logan
General Contractor: RHC Construction & Management Inc.
Client: Comstock Realty Partners LLC.
Photographers: Billy Hustace