Up, up, and away!

It's about to get a whole lot busier in my little neighborhood of the city: Facebook arrives in San Francisco with city's largest office lease in three years

Facebook Inc. signed San Francisco's largest office lease in three years, taking the entire office portion of 181 Fremont in another blockbuster deal in the city.

The lease of 436,000 square feet was confirmed by Matt Lituchy, chief investment officer of landlord Jay Paul Co.

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The space at 181 Fremont can hold between 2,000 and 3,000 employees.

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"While Instagram's HQ will remain in Menlo Park on Facebook's campus, a small team from Instagram will be moving to San Francisco in early 2018. With this lease, we've obtained the space we need at 181 Fremont to support our growth," said Jamil Walker, a Facebook spokesman.

Facebook's deal surpasses Airbnb's 287,000-square-foot deal earlier this year and is the largest since 2014, when Salesforce took 714,000 square feet in 181 Fremont's neighbor, Salesforce Tower. (Salesforce has since taken more space in the tower.)

Over on my side of the the Transbay Transit Center, the latest news involves the public art installation that will occupy the top nine stories of the Salesforce Tower: Jim Campbell: Far Away Up Close

Campbell’s pieces are unique among artists using technology — not only because he designs and builds the computer systems that make them function. More significantly, his choice of media is conceptually linked to his message: he uses technologies developed for information transfer and storage to explore human communication and memory. His is not technology used merely to wow, but to consider the relationship of our minds to the technologies we’ve created.

To be completed within the next few months and visible for decades to come, Campbell’s artwork on the top nine stories of the exterior of San Francisco’s new Salesforce Tower — the tallest building on the West Coast — will fundamentally alter the Bay Area skyline as well as the nature and purpose of public art. Unlike any permanent public artwork to date, Campbell’s piece will change daily, as a direct reflection of the life of the city in which it exists.

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and moved to San Francisco after earning degrees in mathematics and engineering from MIT. He transitioned from filmmaking to interactive video installations in the mid 1980s, and began using LEDs as his primary medium in 2000. His custom electronic artworks and installations have made him one of the leading figures in the use of computer technology as an art form.

And then, right smack in between the Salesforce Tower and 181 Fremont, there is still "that building," and all the action there, nowadays, is happening in court: Lawyers Fear SF's Millennium Tower Could Tilt 10 More Inches by 2019

At its current rate, San Francisco's troubled Millennium Tower could tilt another 10 inches toward the Salesforce Tower in the next two years, lawyers for the homeowners warned in a legal filing urging a speedy trial over the sinking building.

Owners of condos in the listing tower hoped to impress upon Judge Curtis Karnow the need to push for a trial by mid-2018 and to fund a fix.

But at a hearing on Monday, Karnow put off key decisions in the complicated case until October to give the many parties – the developer, builder, engineering consultants as well as homeowners and the city – time to plot out how best to proceed.

The homeowners association wants the court to endorse its plan to drive about 150 concrete and steel piles through the tower’s 10-foot-thick foundation all the way to bedrock.

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in its response, the legal team for the Millennium emphasized the recent findings by its consultant that the building “remains structurally and seismically safe." Homeowners would be better off going after tall buildings nearby such as Salesforce, they contend, as there is “ample evidence” that their construction and removal of water around the tower is “a significant cause of the tilt” of the building.

Millennium called the homeowners’ plan a “self-selected remedy,” that has yet to be approved or even been “meaningfully evaluated.”

Judge Karnow sounds like a pretty interesting fellow: here's a profile and short biography of him.