Ceitronics Innovative Technology

How San Francisco's Historic City Hall Became One of the "Smartest Buildings in the World"

After the Loma Prieta Earthquake, the Nation’s Largest FEMA Project Conforms Innovative Technology to Historical Guidelines

SAN FRANCISCO--(January 5, 1999)--“The charge,” said Architect and Project Manager Tony Irons, “was to make San Francisco City Hall one of the smartest buildings in the world.”

Making the venerable City Hall ‘smart’ during the recently completed restoration meant replacing badly outdated technology that had grown haphazardly within the building during the last few decades. Miles of cables snaked willy-nilly throughout the structure, often obscuring its historic Beaux Arts character, marble floors, and Manchurian oak walls. Communication systems were antiquated, causing both the public and the press to sometimes wonder if the beloved icona national landmark built in 1916 would ever function effectively in high-tech San Francisco.

National Historic Preservation Guidelines mandated that newly installed technology, no matter how innovative, could no longer obscure or mar the historic character of the building. Although faced with a technological Mission Impossible, a creative group of architects, designers, and integrators from both the public and private sector found a way through the puzzle.

The team included Tony Irons and his staff; consulting architect Heller Manus/Komorous-Towey/Finger & Moy Joint Venture Architects; specialty consultant for sound, video and broadcasting Kenneth Fause of Smith, Fause and McDonald; and systems integrator Ceitronics, Inc. Their collaboration insured the implementation of a number of complex technological systems within City Hall, that not only respect and maintain its historic character, but will carry the building through the next 25 years of sweeping technological change.

“The conceptual plan offered by the public/private City Hall Telecommunications Task Force was to wire City Hall as a ‘smart building,’” said Ken Fause. “This was a long-term vision for effective technological use of the building, one of the wisest uses of taxpayers’ money by the city.”

“What we are doing here is pretty unique,” said Yomi Agunbiade, San Francisco’s telecommunications project manager for the City Hall Renovation. “Historical preservations are rare and one of this size is almost unheard of. This is one of the largest and most challenging telecommunications jobs in the country.

“We want the renovation to have staying power so the public will receive a long-lasting value. In order to make that happen, the sheer breadth of knowledge we have to have about all the technology is mind-boggling.

“Restoring the building to its Beaux Arts period wasn’t just a laudable goal,” added Agunbiade. “It’s also tied into a $100 million-plus funding commitment on the part of the Federal Emergency Management Authority--the largest FEMA grant in the country. When we received the money, we agreed to comply with the guidelines for the renovation of a historic building. Before its renovation, the building’s technical infrastructure had become a telecommunications nightmare. There was wire in the ceilings, and wire strewn throughout the attic. The wire went across the floors, out in view, into the hallways, with no respect at all for the historical value of the building. It was a patchwork approach and it wasn’t going to be tolerated during the renovation.

“We designed a cabling system that was placed behind existing facades that is used as transport for all low-voltage communications throughout the building. The overall telecommunications design got the conduit in successfully through the building without disturbing its historical character, and distributed it to twenty intermediate distribution frames throughout the facility. It was routed horizontally from the distribution frames to the office spaces. The challenge was being able to put as much conduit behind existing walls as possible, and run it from the basement, which houses most of the central locations for serverswithout disturbing the historical character of the building.

“We had to get all that through the building and into the four floors and up in the rotunda. We had to make concessions, because there wasn’t a way to get conduit that was large enough into certain areas, and we ended up having to install many smaller conduits through the spaces so that we could get the cabling where we needed it.

“Instead of installing one six-inch conduit from point A to B, you might have to install four or five inch-and-a-half conduits because that’s the only space you have, especially getting across corridors,” said Agunbiade. “The way the corridors are built, and the historic character, we were limited in the amount of ceiling we could remove, and the amount of access we could provide. This minimized the size of conduits that could be run from place to place on each of the upper floors. Getting past that challenge was the key.”

“The historical context also set limitations for the design,” said system designer Ken Fause. “We had to respect the agreement that the impact above the basement level would be minimal. It really led to a technical-system architecture that has a large processing core in the basement. There was no possibility of changing any of the surface finishes, therefore no possibility to alter the acoustics of the spaces. Literally, the historical constraints came first, and the functionality concerns came second.

“The collaboration among the team was challenging because the technology used in this case is unusually complex,” said Fause.

“We didn’t set out to design an eclectic mix of technology, but by the time we were finished with the most cost-effective and functional solution, we had quite an eclectic combination. The neat technological solutions were driven by the need to preserve the building’s historic structure.

“For instance, we needed places for equipment. The possible equipment room locations and equipment cabinet locations were constrained by historical context. So we ended up salvaging equipment cabinet rooms out of anterooms, coat closets, wash rooms, or free-standing armoires that were originally used as closets for judges’ robes.”

The sheer number of the systems that needed to be integrated, as well as the system complexities, presented an unusual challenge for Ceitronics, according to Fause. “There’s a digital audio sound system, and a contribution-grade broadcast video system. The signals it produces are adequate for live air use by the broadcasters. The control system is based on Ethernet hardware, and the control system also uses a server technology. The system wiring and transport in many areas is on a structured wiring system. We weren’t trying to invent anythingthis is the most robust way to do this.

“Within that structured wiring system, there is an expansive master antenna television system that’s used for a public events process manager. There is also the means of transporting hearings within the building to various offices so government officials can keep track of the process of the meeting, and enter the meeting when they need to.

“There’s broadband or cable TV, with a massive control system. That’s an unusual collection of what is often treated as separate issues, but they are all included in one contract and have to work together. Ceitronics is one of the few integrators in the country who have accrued experience in all of these areas. In this particular case, the job needed all of them. There are not many integrators in the industry who inherently offer that depth.”

The end result of the complex project will be greater public access to local government. The new broadcast system, for instance, eliminates cabling from broadcast media vans that was regularly run over the floors throughout the building.

“Before the renovation, the practicalities of accommodating the broadcast press, or televising hearings, were very difficult,” Agunbiade said. “The Supervisors’ Chamber is so massive that you had to have hand-held cameras and portable lights with sandbags to hold them up if you wanted to film proceedings. It got done, but what you saw on Channel 54 was sometimes not very professional.

“When any of the TV or radio stations would show up to cover something on the steps or the rotunda, they would have to run it live from their truck. So cable from the camera would be strung through the front doors all the way down to the curb where the satellite van would be. That was definitely one of the things we wanted to eliminate in order to keep the historic interior intact.

“Now we have a facility panel for the broadcast media in a control box at the curb at the corner of Polk and Grove Streets. Media trucks can park around this facility panel. It provides the pathway to hook up to the buildingall you need is a fiber patch cord. Cable running across the lawn and through doors and down hallways is eliminated. It also has power so the media doesn’t have to run generators. We also have facility panels that allow patching of cable in the meeting rooms, press conference rooms and the stairs of the rotunda.

“This also eliminates the amount of large audio-video equipment that gets moved through the building, and minimizes the damage that’s done to the property. In the past it has taken its toll on the 80-year-old wood, plaster, and beautiful artwork.

“Another thing that’s been designed into the building are the meeting spaces for commissions. One of our goals is to have all of the commissions and board committees meet in City Hall. Before the renovation a lot of commissions in this city met in different spaces and at different addresses, and it was difficult for the public to go to commission meetings and voice their opinion because of such disparate locations. With the number of meeting rooms we now have, we can easily use City Hall for all commission meetings. If we ever need an overflow room for the committee meetings, we could use one of the two large Light Courts, and actually set up microphones, video screens and speakers. That would allow even the folks in the overflow rooms to pose questions and to voice their opinions.

“I think that’s going to be a great benefit, because the more people that are involved in government, the more people can be involved in participating in their city and voice their opinions. The infrastructure also allows us to do video conferencing and satellite hookups, so the buildings can also be used for international or worldwide conferences.

“The new technology also makes it possible for the Board of Supervisors to be more efficient. Members of the Board have a number of aides, and during meetings the supervisors often need to consult an aide for specific information. In the past they just had a hardwired buzzer system with a wire from their seat back to the office. But if the aide wasn’t in the office at that point in time, the supervisor was out of luck.

“The new meeting control system, which is one of the problems that Ceitronics helped to solve, allows the supervisor to contact aides anywhere,” said Agunbiade. “We’ve got touch panels at each one of the seated locations in the four chambers and in the committee rooms and in some of the meeting rooms. Each touch panel is backed up by a database. The server allows different users to punch in a code. All the information for that particular user is then brought up to the touch panel, which then allows them to vote, to register that they’re present, or to call their aides.

“The Aide-Call System will send the aide E-mail, can page the aide, can call a cell phonemake use of all the communications choices that we have today. It sounds simple, but it takes a lot of programming.

“It takes a considerable amount of communication between the phone system in the building and the audio-visual system. It has to look seamless and transparent to the users, but there’s a lot of things that get done in the equipment to make that happen. That’s just one of the many complexities of the kind of things that Ken Fause and Ceitronics did with the system.

“This is a once-in-a-hundred-years renovation,” Agunbiade concluded. “Nothing like this has been done to City Hall for the last 80 years, and nothing like this will probably be done ever again, certainly not in the next 80 years. Going forward into the first quarter of the next century, the technology will serve the public well.”