Project Profiles

Variety of Colorful Panels Pull History into the Present

No matter how strong the desire to keep moving forward, it is best not to lose touch with the past. The design of the Channel Mission Bay apartments in San Francisco was able to merge the area’s history with its future through the use of products from Morin, A Kingspan Group Company.

“The underlying theme was to look back at the history of the sites,” said Matt Cindrich, AIA, at Ankrom Mosian Associates. “This area served as a major transportation hub and it had seen better days. It’s now enjoying a resurgence, it’s a center to Internet businesses and biomedical research. There’s a new life emerging in the city.”

Channel Mission Bay provides San Francisco with 315 new market-rate apartments. The concrete superstructure consists of a six-story half and an eight-story half. The six-story portion has a primarily brick exterior with areas of standing seam metal panel and punched window openings. The eight-story section primarily has flush metal siding and punched window openings, all framed by white metal panel.

“Ankrom Moisan’s vision for its client’s large 89,000 square foot parcel called Block 2, was to create two distinct building identities,” Cindrich said. “One a silhouette of the city’s future and the other a reflection of a past it doesn’t entirely want to let go of.”

Cindrich said the focus of the color selections for the metal wall panels revolved around the history of the neighborhood—red and brown brick warehouse buildings, industrial rusty metal colors, “to play up the idea of 100 years of life.” The colors are different, but subtly different, so you really can’t even notice until you get closer to the building. Cindrich was trying to create an “irregular pattern.”

The color choices for the various MORIN products were Turkish Coffee, Polished Mahogany, Standard Bone White and Standard Blue Gray. Turkish Coffee was used for 5,386 square feet of F-12-0 Concealed Fastener wall panels, 3,112 square feet of F-16-0 Concealed Fastener wall panels and 884 square feet of F-18-0 Concealed Fastener wall panels. Polished Mahogany was specified for 1,007 square feet of the F-12-0, 1,203 square feet of the F-16-0 and 445 square feet of the F-18-0 Concealed Fastener wall panels.

“This was the first time we had to mix and match colors and sizes while installing wall panels,” said Lance Blanchard, project manager for Valley Sheet Metal of San Francisco. “It all went well because the panels were packaged, palletized and delivered in the sequence we needed them. Morin even color-coded the packages for us by different floors, areas and elevations.”

Blanchard explains the biggest challenge was a lack of storage and staging space. “It’s right in downtown San Francisco, so there’s not a lot of room to spread out, store materials and layout materials,” he said. “We work almost exclusively with MORIN products and prefer to do so. That comfort level helped us overcome some of the other challenges.”