1735 Sutter St

This is a three-story, six-unit apartment building with brick foundation. It was discovered that the west foundation was a 9ft tall brick retaining wall extending down below garage slab on grade. The difficulty of this project was that new structural shear wall could not be supported on brick, hence a new grade beam supported on helical piers had to be used to avoid surcharging existing brick wall. A soft-story retrofit was achieved with the use of plywood shear wall without utilizing expensive steel moment frames.