In a race against time and the elements, a team of historic rehab experts has mobilized to save a former machine shop from collapse at San Francisco’s Pier 70 shipyard. Their strategy calls for inserting a new structural steel frame within a 19th-century unreinforced masonry building, which had been red-tagged for years and was already crumbling by the time the project team began construction.
“There was a sense of urgency,” says James Madsen, partner with developer Orton Development Inc. “There were bricks falling down literally every day. You’d walk into this building and you’d have patches where you could see daylight through the walls.”