The Pinnacle

Lot I - The Pinnacle is a Medical Office Building. Sharp HealthCare occupies half the building and doctors occupy the other half. Sharp Rees-Stealy occupy the first floor of the new $35 million, 80,000-square-foot Pinnacle Medical Plaza to be built at Scripps Northridge Corporate center in San Diego.

Sharp HealthCare, as part of Sharp Rees-Stealy, signed a 10-year lease for 41,811 square feet of medical office space at the building. This is Sharp Rees-Stealy's 19th location in San Diego County. Serving San Diego since 1923, the medical group has more than 280 primary care doctors and specialists representing every field of medicine.

The building includes X-Ray Machines and other medical machines, examination rooms, and testing equipment. The design of this building was heavily informed by the context in which it is sited. Constricted on three sides by steep slopes and immediately adjacent to a biologically sensitive area, the form took on a wedge shape to provide access to this rocky pinnacle-like ridge. Because the building needed to be over 375 feet long to fit on the site, it was chosen to bifurcate the form into a masonry building (that is half subterranean on the west side) with a punched window vocabulary and a glass building cradled by the masonry.

The natural landscape consisted of muted red-browns and tans, which directed the choice of concrete block as a material. Advantage was taken of the contrasts available between burnished block and precision block to highlight these colors and create a cut earth-like texture. Also, in order to accentuate color and texture, the choice was made to alternate 10" block with 8" block to create shadow lines and strong horizontals so the building doesn't loom above the ridge it sits on. In addition to the earthy, textured masonry, traditional masonry block was used with modular glazed tile cladding as a complement to the green glazed window wall.