McCarthy Cook Adding Two Floors to China Basin Building

McCarthy Cook & Co. has begun construction on a two-floor addition to the Berry Street Building at its China Basin Landing development (pictured) in San Francisco. The 175,000-square-foot expansion will cost about $90 million and will bring the total space of the two-building campus to 925,000 square feet.

The addition will yield the city's largest contiguous floors for office or research and development tenants, the company said. Blocks of office space 100,000 square feet or greater are at a premium in San Francisco, with only eight such Class A spaces available as of late October.

Edward Cook, co-president of McCarthy Cook & Co., told CPN today that the new space will come online in second quarter 2008, and that it could compete directly for life science tenants predominant in Mission Bay but could also accommodate major blocks of office space. "We can do all kinds of tenants but it would be no surprise to know we are targeting the larger users," Cook said.

The two-building China Basin Landing campus--consisting of the three-story Berry Street Building and the six-story Wharfside Building--is across Third Street from AT&T Park, home of baseball's San Francisco Giants. Cook said the access to mass transit systems puts the development in a "literally unassailable position."

Cook also emphasized the new construction method being used by structural engineers Simpson Gumphertz & Heger, a structural isolation system hailed by the company as "revolutionary." Cook said that when the addition is completed, the building will actually be less vulnerable to earthquake damage than before. "This is the first of its kind building in the country," he said, adding that the system was subject to a year of peer review process before being approved.

McCarthy Cook & Co. owns the China Basin Landing in a partnership with San Francisco-based RREEF. HOK Architects designed the Berry Street building addition, and Hathaway Dinwiddie & Co. will be the general contractor for the project.