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The 1906 earthquake reduced 80 percent of the city to rubble. What came up in its place was taller, steel-framed, and proudly vertical. The Flood Building (1904, rebuilt 1906) stood through the quake and anchored the new Market Street. Willis Polk and the city's Beaux-Arts generation gave San Francisco its first skyline.

• 1904 Flood Building Albert Pissis · Steel-frame survivor
• 1914 Hobart Building Willis Polk · The city's first residential high-rise gestures
• 1927 Russ Building George Kelham · 32 floors — tallest on the coast until 1964

The Depression, then the war, paused vertical construction. San Francisco stayed low. The 1950s saw a handful of modernist experiments — cooperative apartment buildings on Russian Hill and Nob Hill — but no real towers. The skyline of 1960 looked much like the skyline of 1930.

• 1957 1000 Chestnut Mario Gaidano · Russian Hill's first true tower
• 1963 1200 California John S. Bolles · Nob Hill co-op pioneer
• 1965 Summit (999 Green) Claude Oakland · The apartment building that changed Russian Hill

Transamerica chose a pyramid. Embarcadero Center chose repetition. Fontana Towers chose the waterfront, and the preservation movement almost stopped them. This was the era when San Francisco decided, one lawsuit at a time, what kind of city it would become. Height limits, shadow studies, and Proposition K all entered the vocabulary.

• 1965 Fontana Towers Milton Meyer · The buildings that triggered SF's height-limit movement
• 1965 The Summit Claude Oakland · 32 floors of cooperative living
• 1925 Park Lane Houghton Sawyer · Renovated and elevated into modernity

SOMA reinvented itself. Live-work lofts — legal only through a zoning quirk that briefly let developers build residential on industrial parcels — put the first wave of residents south of Market. The Brannan (2002) and 235 Berry (2002) showed what mid-rise condominium living could look like when the neighborhood was built around it rather than retrofitted into it.

• 2001 Four Seasons Residences Del Campo + Maru · Luxury hotel-branded residences arrive
• 2002 The Brannan HKS Architects · South Beach's first large residential complex
• 1996 The Palace Kaplan McLaughlin · Prewar bones, new interiors, South Beach setting

In 2005, the Rincon Hill area plan tripled allowable heights on three adjacent blocks. One Rincon Hill went up first. Millennium Tower followed two years later. The third building had to tilt. The Infinity, Bridgeview, and Arterra all joined the first generation of true SF residential towers — buildings whose design brief was vertical.

• 2008 One Rincon Hill Solomon Cordwell Buenz · The first new post-1989 residential tower
• 2009 Millennium Tower Handel Architects · 58 floors — and the famous lean
• 2009 The Infinity Heller Manus · South Beach's twin-tower moment

Salesforce Tower topped out at 1,070 feet — the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Nothing residential touched it, but 181 Fremont, LUMINA, and The Avery all went over 400 feet and set new benchmarks for finishes. ONE Steuart Lane and MIRA brought the era to a close with forms that wouldn't have been buildable a decade earlier.

• 2015 LUMINA Bernardo Fort-Brescia · Four towers, 656 units, South Beach density
• 2018 181 Fremont Heller Manus · The penthouse set the citywide ceiling
• 2020 MIRA Studio Gang · The twisting tower — Jeanne Gang's SF debut
• 2021 ONE Steuart Lane SOM · The bar for 2020s luxury, and the last before rates rose