Fortresslike power plants are usually perceived as an intrusion on the visual environment. But the San Francisco utility giant PG&E has long taken exception to that truism.

The prosaic city garage at 690 Folsom Street in downtown San Francisco had been neglected for decades, but a recent makeover is attracting attention.

A surgical restoration preserves an eccentric artist's singular home in San Francisco.

A soaring symbol of San Francisco’s past, 140 New Montgomery—also known as the PacBell Building—has become a hub for some of the Bay Area’s most forward-looking companies.

Dramatically framed by Morphosis’s glassy Federal Building looming behind it, the revived Strand theater, a gleaming red experimental performance space and education center for the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, clicks into its site on San Francisco’s Market Street like one of the final pieces of a complex puzzle.

In San Francisco, the latest tech office has the cultural prominence a lavish restaurant or fancy boutique would elsewhere. As the battle to entice technical talent continues, designers strive to outdo the competition with their imaginative environments.

Atlanta-based developer Jamestown wanted its Pacific Place office building, at 22 Fourth Street in downtown San Francisco, to appeal to young tech workers with a lobby similar to that of a hip hotel.

On the site of an 850-square-foot cottage from the early 1900s, the architects sought to create two new compact, modern, single-family homes in an architecturally conservative area.

The architect aimed to convert the former 8-by-11-foot boiler room of a commercial laundry to a guesthouse and potential full-time residence.

For a new caf', an architect re-engineers the DNA of the California Academy of Sciences next door.