Shell Building (San Francisco)
skyscraper in San Francisco
The Shell Building is an office tower in the Financial District of San Francisco, California. The 28-story, 115.22 m (378.0 ft), building is located at 100 Bush Street, at Battery Street. It was designed by George W. Kelham and built in 1929, in the architectural style of Gothic Moderne, Moderne and Art Deco.
Overview
Shell USA occupied the building until the 1960s. There are castings of shells that decorate the cornice on the upper levels as well as shell designs in the lobby floor and decorative grill at the front of the building.
A renovation by Heller Manus Architects won the San Francisco Architectural Heritage Award in 1994.
The Shell Building is visible in the background of the rooftop scene at the end of the 1997 movie The Game.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Shell Building (San Francisco)” is skyscraper in San Francisco. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Shell, Building and Francisco, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “skyscraper in San Francisco” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3481830. Authority coordinates are 37.791, -122.400. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1994 and 1997.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shell Building (San Francisco)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.