HPC Meeting - 17 June

On Wednesday the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission began the meeting with Planning Staff presenting an update on the status of the Articles 10 and 11 code changes. Unfortunately it is very probable that the Board of Supervisors will not hear the changes until, at least, August because of budget problems. The Commission then discussed their letter about the Lombard Street cottage again and they are having difficulty finding the right wording. It was continued again. Ironically no one mentioned that the Building Inspection Commission voted to reject the proposed blighted and vacant building code changes that were initiated because of the demolition fiasco. I find this whole emergency demolition process fascinating. While the great divide between Planning and Building exists there can be no real solution.

The Branch Library Improvement Program, or BLIP, presented a projects overview. Numerous people came out to speak, both for and against. Turns out several libraries are slated for demolition, including the North Beach and Ortega branches and some of the projects propose questionable additions. I have not been diligent with following the library projects. Perhaps my general avoidance stems from my disappointment with the abandonment of the Old and construction of the New Main Library so many years ago. The Consent Calendar consisted of a signage project for Landmark No. 3 and was unanimously approved. Then it was back to libraries with a Certificate of Appropriateness for a project at the Presidio Branch. I left the meeting around three before the item was completed.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is one of my favorite books. Written by James Agee and featuring photographs by Walker Evans, the book is the result of a journey into, and documentation of, sharecroppers in Alabama in 1936. The experience was overwhelming for Agee and he struggled with what he saw. On "beauty" he wrote, "Thus there are conveyed here two kinds of classicism, essentially different yet related and beautifully euphonious. These classicisms are created of economic need, of local availability and of local-primitive tradition: and in their purity they are the exclusive property and privilege of the people at the bottom of the world. To those who own and create it this beauty is, however irrelevant and undiscernible. It is best discernible to those who by economic advantages of training have only a shameful and thief's right to it..."

Architectural Record - June issue

When I received this month's Architectural Record magazine in the mail I was instantly disturbed by its cover. The front bore the title "Adaptation + Preservation, Rebooting Yesterday's Buildings for Today's World." Rebooting?? Really? sigh. Terrified that reading the magazine would cause me pain I avoided it. I cleaned my house, I did my laundry, went grocery shopping, watched a movie... Finally I got up the courage today and reading it actually wasn't as bad as the cover made it out to be! Generally the projects were on the fringe of what is considered "preservation". But the overall tone was good and it did not further mention rebooting. The pictures of Our Lady of the Conception Chapel in Brazil by Paulo Mendes da Rocha were exquisite. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown evoke memories of college and so I was interested in the article about moving the Lieb House in New Jersey. Sadly San Francisco was represented by an unfortunate experiment at 185 Post Street. At least they wrapped it up with the unbelievable Montpelier restoration!

On a side note, on Thursday at the SF AIA there will be a panel discussion entitled Landscape Design within the Historic Context (a very complicated subject!) Though I can't, those who can, should go!

Friends School

On Saturday San Francisco Architectural Heritage held its annual meeting at the San Francisco Friends School. Quaker design philosophy is extremely appealing to me and my great uncle, Selby Cluer, was a practicing Quaker and architect! It is tremendous that the Levi Strauss Company choose the Friends School for their historic building. During the Great Depression the Levi Strauss Company had it's employees lay new maple floors to avoid having to lay people off. These maple floors were retained to the greatest extent possible during the rehabilitation project.

HPC Meeting - 3 June

Today's San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission meeting was particularly interesting. During public comment someone expressed concern about the Park Branch Library which is a beautiful building and it is alarming to think that it might be in jeopardy. During matters of the board the Lombard Street cottage (see also blog posting HPC Meeting - May 20) was again discussed and I presented the following comments to the Commission.

"I think the the underlying problem with the emergency demolition process is that we aren't asking the right people the right questions. Times have changed. We don't need to ask an engineer, "Can we save this building?" We are at a point in which pretty much anything can be done. The question is what do we need to do to save the building and how much is it going to cost? Engineers are problem solvers. They don't want to write Feasibility Studies they want to be designing crazy, steel stabilizing structures with cranes and lasers and computers and things... The only limiting factor these days is money. So perhaps I am biased, but I think the question of whether or not to save a building lies with the Planning Department to assign its cultural value. If City Hall was falling down we would, and have in the past, pulled out all the stops to save it. Should we have made the property owner of the Lombard Street cottage pay whatever it takes to stabilize the building? Say it would have cost $500,000 dollars. Would it have been worth it? I think that is the question that should be discussed in the future."

This was followed by an approval of the consent calendar, which included three projects replacing their windows, and then an informational presentation about the status of the Notre Dame School (Landmark 137). The next item was a fantastic presentation by Mark Kessler, a professor at the University of California, Davis. He shared his views on the San Francisco "Auto-Row" typology. The presentation can hardly be justifiably paraphrased but basically he noted that "Auto-Row" buildings have "historicist" facades with industrial structures. He linked this approach to what was also commonplace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Exposition buildings. A particular appealing analogy that he used was that destroying a building that contributes to a district was like pulling out a thread in the fabric of the built environment; leaving the other threads hanging. He sited the Patagonia Store as a good reuse project for an "Auto-Row" building.

The next item was an amendment to San Francisco Building Code Section 103A creating a vacant-abandoned building registry and additional maintenance requirements. This is a Supervisor Sponsored amendment and is directly in response to the Lombard Street cottage debacle. There were a lot of good ideas tossed around including outreach and hardship clauses. I think that to avoid some really bad press the City better take a good look at how many buildings they own that are vacant and make sure that they can pay for the new requirements before they ask the public to!! After this item I left the meeting and do not at this time know the outcome of the additional items on the agenda.