UPDATE May 16, 2022 - Autodesk closed their Mission Street offices earlier this year (2022) because "a majority of employees balked at coming into the office," according to the San Francisco Business Times.
UPDATED June 27, 2021 with latest video.
The San Francisco Bay Area tech firms were quick to send their employees home to work, but now some of them are reeling employees back to the office. Autodesk has doubled down on the “reopen America for business” theme by adding 117,000 square feet of office space near the beginning of Mission Street, just a couple of blocks from the company’s Market Street office, joining the dream Autodesk Workshop on Pier 9, making a scattered campus of sorts in the San Francisco downtown area. In addition, eight Autodesk offices were either added to or remodeled worldwide: Amman (Jordan), Paris, Krakow (Poland), Denver, London and Munich, along with two locations in Barcelona.
The 300 Mission Street office space is due to open at the end of June.
Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Facebook and Amazon led a national tech movement to get workers out of the office as the pandemic was taking hold. Others followed, and by March 2020, a million techies were working from home, based on estimates from the Wall Street Journal.
Autodesk’s neighbor, Salesforce.com, which employs over 50,000 people worldwide, announced this month that it will be reopening its downtown office building—the tallest tower in San Francisco. Companies are gingerly ramping up an office presence, starting with a few days a week. Some are trying a three-day workweek (Tuesday through Thursday). For the companies letting their employees choose the days, Thursdays are proving to be the most popular.
One Market Street Plaza, just a couple of blocks away from Autodesk’s new office space, has become the beating heart of the company, even though its official headquarters remain 30 miles north, across the Golden Gate Bridge, in San Rafael, Marin County. Not only are the company’s top executives all at One Market, but so are the important events and the company’s showroom—the Autodesk Gallery—site of the extremely popular (pre-pandemic, of course) Design Night parties. The flight out of the city by many during the pandemic has not helped the San Rafael office, which each year seems closer to becoming an outpost in the hinterlands.
Workers coming back to the office will be cheered by the business districts of most U.S. cities, where restaurants, coffee shops, parking garages and hotels have been suffering. At the height of worry, San Francisco was projected to lose 50 percent of its restaurants.
Where once landlords were touting concessions to keep the tenants they had, there now appears to be a turnaround. The number of tenants entering the market has started rising in recent weeks as the vaccination rollout has progressed, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Seattle had more than twice the number of tenant searches in March of this year as it had in January, for example. And the tech sector seems to have swung back to its leadership position, as the average rent negotiated now is even higher than it was before the pandemic.
Alphabet, one of the largest employers in the Bay Area, has said that it plans to return to the office later this year, signaling to the tech industry that the work-at-home movement has lost momentum and may be going in reverse.
Autodesk made good use of its own tools to design the new offices. The architects worked with Revit for BIM. AutoCAD was used for space planning, and Navisworks supplied clash detection. BIM 360 was used for construction project planning and collaboration, as the pandemic forced teams to be distributed in different locations. Local employees provided input, too, resulting in San Francisco themes being displayed on each floor, art commissioned from local artists and a variety of perks, including a gym, a music studio and game rooms.
As the pandemic has waned in California (Marin County was recently found to be no. 1 among the most vaccinated in the U.S., at 73%) but not left us completely, Autodesk’s new offices have been designed with the pandemic in mind and the health and safety measure taken at 300 Mission Street will serve as a guide for future office designs and alterations elsewhere.
Autodesk decided to lower the overall office capacity by 30 percent to allow proper physical distancing. Meeting room capacities have also been adjusted to allow physical distancing for in-person meetings. Workplaces are more spread out to encourage physical distancing among employees, and plexiglass screens provide a physical boundary between workers—while still maintaining a visual openness and allowing access to natural light. Seats next to each other will face in opposite directions so that one employee is not breathing on the other.
In addition, the 300 Mission office will have one-way directional hallways and touchless faucets and kitchen appliances. An antimicrobial film will be applied to high-touch surfaces like tablets. Touchless door hardware and restroom fixtures are used wherever possible. Hand sanitizing stations are found throughout the office space. Flat-screen monitors will display messages reminding employees of pandemic protocols.
The building known as 300 Mission Street is a 24-story Class A, LEED Platinum tower that was formerly known as 50 Beale Street. It is owned by Paramount Group, the same company that leases Autodesk the One Market Plaza office space. Autodesk signed the lease for 300 Mission Street in 2019 for 116,700 square feet. That same quarter, Glassdoor also moved to the same address (from Sausalito, Marin County) as did Maplebear. The three tenants account for a total of 262,000 square feet of space. The average initial rent for the total space was stated as $92.70 per square foot annually, making Autodesk’s initial rent for its share of space at about $900,000 per month. Rental space has dropped significantly during the pandemic (8% in San Francisco since 2019) and tenants have been successful in negotiating concessions, although it is not known if this happened with the Autodesk lease.