140 Stories

Beautiful Lobby + Garden Art

Lobby Furniture

140’s lobby furniture evokes the shapes of art deco design while conforming to modern office lobby use as a place to meet and relax.  The concierge desk was constructed by Plant Architectural Woodwork from a design by Brayton Hughes Design. The exterior of the desk is an ebony veneer, with custom milled metal corners to provide stiffness and durability. The sofa across the lobby pulls together the ebony veneer of the desk and the Edelman leather panels of the modernized elevator cabs.

Lobby Art

140 New Montgomery has been home to innovative technology for 90 years. 140 also stands proudly in the center of San Francisco’s thriving arts district. Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work embodies this blend of science and innovation with his Lightning Fields collection, which 140 is proud to showcase in its main lobby.

Writer Christopher Turner, in a story for Modern Painters magazine, notes that Sugimoto’s images, “Take us back to the beginning of photography…Sugimoto has always explored photography’s philosophical possibilities – capturing light in time – he’s now gone back to its literal origins.” Sugimoto said of his work, “To be a good photographer you have to be a scientist as well.”

To create his lightning field series, which was produced from 2006-2010, Sugimoto (b. 1948), used a Van de Graaff generator to charge a metal ball with static (the generator could produce up to 40,000 volts of electricity). The ball was then touched to a large metal table with a six-by-three-foot sheet of film. In an instant, the electricity rips through the film, producing the resulting images. Ranging from strong lightning bolts, to more tree-like branching, to almost ghost-like clouds, Lighting Fields harmonizes art, science and the history of photography – an ideal match for 140’s striking lobby.

140’s Gardens

Formerly used as a parking lot for equipment trucks and the home for a large diesel generator, 140’s outdoor space is now a place for tenants to gather informally and an area for diners to linger over an evening meal.

The planting, particularly the deciduous Ginko trees with their colorful leaves in the large main planter, provide a sense of the seasons, while small fruit trees in the smaller planters provide fresh produce for use by the street-level restaurants.

The stone pavers, benches and planter boxes provide for casual seating and give the courtyard a strong sense of its urban setting. The Carrera marble walls do double-duty – providing a backdrop for the planting and hiding mechanical equipment that is part of 140’s modernized building infrastructure.