BY ZACH MORTICE
The finished and installed concrete cistern. Image courtesy of Concreteworks.
Hired to design the atrium courtyard of a San Francisco spec office building that features a canted glass roof that channels rainwater, David Meyer of Meyer + Silberberg Land Architects got a few simple instructions from the building?s architects at Pfau Long Architecture?the most interesting of which was to ?do something with the water? that the roof would corral into a cascading stream, dripping into the atrium.
But that simple request kicked off a high-wire adventure that saw a three-ton concrete rainwater cistern installed in the courtyard, pushing concrete fabricators to their limits.
Meyer turned to the specialty concrete fabrication firm Concreteworks to manufacture the cistern at 270 Brannan, built by developers SKS. Meyer?s most important request" The cistern had to be one continuous piece. After delays from the general contractor, Meyer says, Concreteworks was nearly bumped from the project, and substitute fabricators wanted to assemble the cistern from 16 pieces. ?This has to be done artistically, as sculpture, not as a fabricated quilt work of GFRC [glass fiber reinforced concrete] that would dramatically change the look of it,? he says. A move to a new production facility meant that Concreteworks could meet the project?s tight deadlines, and deliver a sculptural whole that would define the atrium. The two-ton mold for the cistern was made of wood and foam....