The Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has nearly completed work on their new 56-story residential tower in San Francisco, The Avery. To celebrate, the firm has unveiled a series of new photographs of the spaces that have so far been completed, including the tower's exterior, amenity areas, and penthouse.

The project, undertaken with Fougeron Architecture, HKS, Clodaugh Design, Y.A. studio, and Jay Jeffers, will bring 548 residential units to San Francisco's bustling Transbay district. Designed as a tower-and-podium scheme, the development includes a mid-block paseo that has been carved out of the site's buildable area. The walking street is overlooked by Fourgeron's contextual, apartment-wrapped podium designs. The new mid-block shopping area includes trees, native vegetation, and public open spaces, and is overlooked by apartments wrapped in industrial materials like brick and tooled stone. 

Included in the project are 118 condominiums, 280 market-rate rentals, and 150 affordable apartments. Clodaugh Design created the interiors for the tower while Jay Jeffers designed the penthouse spaces.

OMA New York partners Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long are credited with the tower's design and with the urban plan for the site. 

OMA's crenelated, glass- and Portuguese limestone-clad tower is designed to dematerialize from a stark, rigid form into its more vividly-articulated surroundings. As a result, the building features crenelations both in plan and section. It also steps back from the property line along one side of the site to "provide a more pedestrian-friendly corner," according to a press release. 

The scheme bears both formal and conceptual resemblance to two previously-proposed but ultimately unsuccessful OMA projects, 23 East 22nd Street in New York City and 111 First Street in Jersey City. Though visually different, the three projects, along with the currently-under construction Greenpoint Landing in Brooklyn, represent an effort to evoke, repurpose, and reposition archetypal tower forms—like Art Deco-era wedding cake designs and conventional, developer-driven serial assemblies—to generate new high-rise types for today's fragmented urban environments. 

As a result the San Francisco tower lurches in and out of view from certain vantages, and, wrapped in reflective glass, appears to dematerialize into the sky from others.  

The tower's Jay Jeffers-designed penthouse enjoys wrap-around views of the nearby Bay Bridge and other local landmarks. 

The project is scheduled for final completion in late 2019.