door. i personally don't like big podium buildings, so i like the concept of a lesser podium. but can you talk about how you looked at the shadow plain and what were the considerations for supporting this design? >> certainly. thank you, commissioner. first of all, there are criteria in the code that allow under certain circumstances for the commission to grant an exception. and i'll get into those in just a moment. but if i can have the overhead, this is a representation of the sloping sunlight access plain that was referred to. both in elevation and three-dimensional view. so this line represents the 132-foot point at which that sunlight access plain is supposed to begin sloping back at 62 degrees. and what this shows in this particular -- for this particular site is that it effectively casts the height of the subject property lower than

the regulated height that applies to -- the majority of the site from a 150-foot zone, which is on the opposite side. so the criteria for exception are the criteria that staff considers in making its recommendations are, number one, whether it create an ungainly or an unduly burdensome restriction on the site and number two, that the shadow that is cast on the sidewalks is not really a significant shadow because of where it falls or what time it falls at the duration. focusing on the issue of the nature of the shadow, i know there were excerpts shown that at specific times a day, maybe with what could be perceived as dire shadows being cast, but it should be understood that obviously shadows are a dynamic thing throughout the year and across time. we don't necessarily consider senate shots in time when we're

looking -- snapshots in time. you have to consider the totality of the year. shad doim pacts on sidewalks for most of the year were on average 45 minutes. certain parts of the year were a little bit less, or new shadows were eliminated entirely. certainly parts of the year were longer. around the solstice months when the duration and shadows got longer, it was in-between lunch hour and prior to sort of the evening pedestrians commute hours. so one would presume there would be less pedestrians traffic on the street. obviously it's a subjective call as to how much of an ungainly form precludes development or how much the project makes it economically unfeasible, but according to the calculations provided, presuming that development would essentially be capped on this site on this 21st floor

and above and then substantially be reduce blowed it, the proposed project would reduce by about 100,000 square feet of development potential. and it essentially amounts to a project zone that is zoned at this height. commissioner borden: can you talk about the difference between the bulk? it's the mid area that's causing the bulk exception. could you talk about that? >> the lower portion of the project, which is the central part of the tower above the base, below the upper-most kind of setback portion, does exceed the bulk requirement in a couple of respects. number one, the diagonal sort of plan dimension with a maximum floor size just slightly. it's about 500 square feet over the maximum floor size and there's also a requirement for maximum average floor size for the lower tower, that's 17,000 square feet. each floor in this particular

tower is 27,000 square feet. as mentioned by the project sponsor, the base, which does not have any bulk requirements, is actually a little bit smaller than it would be allowed to be. commissioner borden: but the bulk requirements don't change the shadow. >> no, they are two independent requirements of the code, each with their own criteria and considerations for considering requests for exceptions. commissioner borden: so the bulk doesn't have any effect on that. >> correct. exactly. obviously the shape of the building can affect wind and shadow patterns. but as far as a process on whether or not to grants an exception, they're different in each case. >> if i could add to that, so you understand the department's ration nail for the recommendation. mr. shannon is right, that's fairly late in the process i asked them to consider fairly major design changes. and we felt that bulk of the

upper part of the building was inappropriate from that site both from a street presence and from a skyline presence and we felt that if the upper tower was to be -- could be reduced in size to more closely meet the requirements and intent of the code, then having the bulk increase in the lower floors made more sense. essentially a tradeoff between the upper third or upper half of the building and the lower third of the building. with respect to the shadow, the concern that i had that i've seen in fact in many places is such a drastic reduction in floor-plate size simply leads to a building that had unworkable floors. they lead to floors that are 7,000 square feet or less. and buildings of that type simply have not been built. even residential buildings cannot be built on that small scale. it's simply not possible anymore for a building that small with that small a floor plate.

so it's a code requirement that has great intent. i totally understand the intent of it. i simply don't think it's realistic anymore to have buildings with those type of floor plates. it simply doesn't work anymore. that's why we recommended the bulk dr the exception to that particular code requirement and why we propose having a smaller floor plate at the top portion of the building and a somewhat larger floor plate at the bottom. commissioner borden: thank you for that. i know we see in general a lot of bulk exceptions, whether it's affordable housing, for-profit housing or office buildings. and i think at some point we should have a hearing -- i mean, i'd like to better understand what is wrong with our code maybe, that we have this problem fairly often. president miguel: commissioner sugaya. commissioner sugaya: yes, thank you. i guess for me, i understand that -- and i think this is right. a code-compliant building, as people have been trying to point out, probably is not

going to result in anything that's substantially -- i hate to use the word different, but you're not going to get what you think you're going to get for those who testified along those lines. and i think the project sponsor and architects have probably pointed that out also. for me becoming code compliant isn't the issue. i just think that the mass and scale of this building is too big for the site and location that it's at, adjacent to a conservation district and in this part of town. and i'm extremely disappointed that the developer hasn't taken that more into consideration and provided us with a design that is much more compatible with the surrounding area, but has chosen to basically max out the f.a.r., the height and everything else. maybe that's probably based on considerations of profit and how much they paid for the

property, etc., etc., and they have to get everything out of it. i quite understand all of that. but i think the building is not the right building. and for staff to say that the upper tower is now more slender and the amount of square footage has now been transferred lower into the building is just playing with the same amount of square footage without having reduced it one bit from my perspective. so that's my problem is basically that we have a situation from a civic kind of standpoint and a city standpoint that i don't believe this building fits into the environment the way that it's surntly designed. i have no problem with it being 350 square feet. it's just the way that it's massed that i think intrudes upon the area that surrounds this particular location.

president miguel: commissioner lee. commissioner lee: i have a little different take on this. i always listen to ms. hester about some of the adverse commute issues that we have is that we're building condos housing from people for google and yahoo!. there are buses to take them down south. many issues with these large corporations with wells fargo to charles schwab is to bring all their satellite offices from downtown to be more efficient into a building that could take what they have. e.p.a., which is large there next door in the back on hawthorne lane. so in some ways i did have the opportunity to meet with carl and heller man us to discuss this issue. part of the argument, which is fairly true, is the silicon

valley or mission bay, the question is economies to scale. to have a large enough building where you can get these corporations to actually -- and the use government. there's a reason why the u.s. government built a height density from the courthouse to bring all their satellite people to be more efficient and have a more moderate building, where your floor space is such that having your ventilation, instead of blowing from below, coming from the top to have a floor where all your optic fibers are from the bottom, that you can move around depending on who moves into your building. and some of the thought behind this, i felt, was very far-reaching, because my question to, i guess, the developer, carl, you're taking a big risk in doing this. so my question is this issue of transit, housing and jobs, which i think, you know, the more i thought about it, i

thought it kind of makes essential that if we brought -- and let me ask carl this, about this issue, can we get companies from down south to move up here? because a lot of young people, the high-tech people, the twitter people and facebook people, are down south. so i don't -- i think i understand the market, but you know better than i do. so my question to you, carl, is what's the likelihood, if you don't get e.p.a. here or sun or some other corporation, what's the likelihood of getting other corporations from down south from east bay to move to -- into your building? >> sure. it's a very good question the silicon valley bank came to 555 kls mission, i would point out. you look at the demographics and the demographics -- if you're 20-something and you want to work for a tech firm, you come and you live in san francisco. and i live in the city. i take volers across lombard

street all the time. i, in the morning, see the buses sit in the presidio waiting to take all these people down to mountainview and santa clara every day. and you see these companies. and from an h.r. perspective, the people that they want to hire want to live in san francisco. and those people are going to live here, and those companies will come to san francisco. you've seen google do it at hills plaza. that space is completely overprescribed for them in terms of their internal use. you've seen sale force which started in san mateo. sales force has grown from a company that nobody had heard of a couple of years ago. we talked to them three or four years ago. they said we need maybe 200,000 square feet. now they're talking five, 600 square feet. -- five, 600,000 square feet.

san francisco is the downtown for that integrated technology economy, and we need to provide the office buildings, because those tenants will come here because the employees want to be here, want to live here. and, yes, it's a big bet on our part. we're in the business of taking financial bests and risks. but we're in the business of doing that prudently and we think this is a great site to attract those kind of tenants. did i address the question? commissioner lee: thank you. see, what i like about the corner is that remember second street is actually six lanes, then howard street is six lanes. so we only have 50-some parking spaces. the transbay terminal is not going to be far away. if i had my way, i'd like to have more parking under your building. but given that you have mass transportation so close and we are the transit hub of the bay area, and every time i think of -- this is a building i would think he would support.

there's almost no cars there. and you're close to bart. you're downtown. if we can't build something like this for the future, i don't know anyplace else you can build. having six lanes is unusual. market street, you basically have four lanes there. you have second street, which is sort of a connector in a way, because the next block is new montgomery, which you can go make a right into harrison to get on the freeway. so you're very close to the bay area transit hubs. so i don't have an issue with another 15% of density on the upper levels because in some ways i think some of the issues are the neighbors' view. so if you put more of the bulk on the lower level and the thinness at the higher level, that allows the neighbors to have more view and to have the bulkyness sometimes in the lower level i think will probably block some of the wind issues, especially at the height level. so i don't see really a

downside in this development. president miguel: commissioner olague. commissioner olague: i guess my thoughts are pretty much along the lines of commissioner sugaya's, which are just because you can, doesn't mean you should necessarily all the time. and when i look at this building, i just think it's kind of -- you know, just sticks out like a sore thumb, quite honestly. i'm a lay person, i'm not a professional architect. so i'm going to have to use layman's terms when i communicate my ideas. i think it's a little unfortunate to me that in the c-3 area, we're encouraging more and more residences. we're encouraging people to live there. over the past few years that i've been here, i know there have been times when we've actually voted to switch the use from office to residential in market street in the c-3 area. i don't think that there's

really a process for people who are residents in those areas to kind of participate in these development issues and projects in the c-3 as it goes through the transition. and i know there's no community planning process that's happened obviously or that probably will happen in the c-3 area. and when we've seen projects like this that are going to have huge impacts -- it's a code-compliant project. i get that. and i agree with commissioner sugaya that a code-compliant project is not necessarily going to get the residents there what they want. it's just not going to. so it has to be a conversation that goes outside of the code-compliant conversation. and in other neighborhoods, like market and octavia, eastern neighborhoods, places like that, we have c.a.c.'s, community action, neighbors and others that are going to be

affected by these projects, whether they're residential projects or office building projects whatever, where there's a mechanism in place where people can actually have some input. that mikes me a little uncomfortable that we don't have such a process here, other than through the appeals process, because i think -- what i'm hearing from the neighbors is that they want to see a project there. i think they are fine with seeing an office building there, but it's just how it relates to the residences and the needs of residents and the historic areas that are questions that are still, i think, outstanding. and when we were talking about market -- i keep on going back to market and octavia where we're able to have a lot of in-depth conversations about how the adjacent neighborhoods relate to hud development and certain neighborhoods relate to

areas or neighborhoods that were historic in nature, you know, the whole adjacency issue. but here, outside of that, it's the whole -- i mean, how do we sort of look at the issue of bringing families and residents into the c-3 area? so i think that -- i hope that in the future there's a way of engaging neighbors in that dialogue more than to the a peels, this position where everyone's forced to challenge projects. what i'm hearing from the neighbors is that they don't necessarily even want to challenge this, they just don't really like the way it is currently designed and would be open to something that had a design that was more sensitive to their residential nature of their situation.

so those are my thoughts. i guess i'll just leave it at that for now. and at some point i would like to understand what those eight buildings are, because we do approve a lot of projects here. so sometimes i sort of feel a little stressed when i see labor come out, because i do understand their plight, although that's not our per view here. but i know we have approved several projects over the years and it just has never begun. so i think we should review some of those projects sooner than later and look at why we've approved so many projects that haven't started. these are projects in some instances that have been approved long before the economic downturn and ask, why aren't they moving forward? >> earlier today when we were talking about treasure island,

i was mentioning the interaction of residential density, transportation, commercial. and one of the speakers today was talking about the urban fabric of so massachusetts, which is a -- so marks which is a developing -- so ma, which is a developing and relatively new concept. and it is developing and it will continue to develop without question. the entire area of soma has gone historically through many, many iterations. and i'm not going to go back historically on them. this is and in my opinion should be a mix of residential business, office, recreation and general commercial. that's exactly what is going to make the urban fabric urban in this area. the concept which we keep

talking about of putting jobs and residences in conjunction with transit -- we have no one who has objected to that concept anywhere down the line. it's a large building. there's no question about it. you build buildings in different eras of history depending on the commercial viability of the building. when you built the russ building, you built it because it was commercially viable to do a building like that at that time. you build buildings today for what is hoped to be commercial viability 10 years from now core onlying 10 years from now. you don't build it for 10 years ago.

the new concept of the skin of the building, i keep hearing about this as a historic district. take a look at the block of -- we keep saying second street, because that's the address of the building. take a look at the block of howard street one block east. there is nothing particularly historic about that run-down walk. it's in pretty bad shape. and you can continue down that line for a while. so i understand and i would have object fundamental the base of the building was higher than the historic building next to it. i think that gesture, if one wants to put it that way, is the correct way to go. i think the re veal separates the rest of the building to an extent.

the tradeoff of putting the bulk into the middle tech shown -- i don't think if you reduced those floor plates the 500 square feet would make any difference to the actual building other than the viability, perhaps. but i don't think the objections that we've heard here today would be changed whatsoever. i actually like what the department recently did, even though it caused a redesign of the building. i think the tower works out better than the pictures i've seen of the former design. i think it's a better building. i'm actually intrigued by the skin. and my first view of glass buildings of any size years ago was in texas, except that was

blue glass and god awful architecture and i was turned off by them for years. glass technology has come a long way since those days, and i think this is a far better rendition of the concept. i like the openness of it and the height of the ground floor. i think it's going to be an interesting public space and as a public space i think it will serve the neighborhood quite well in the long run. commissioner moore. commissioner moore: i have been sitting here thinking about commissioner sugaya's thoughts, and i do think that the building is too bulky. on the other hands i think we have a qualified architect who could really make this building shine, and he does already in a certain way. but when i asked him as to whether or not a smaller building would also be ok with him, i did not hear him clearly

say. i'm wondering whether or not we can support the building with modifications to its silhouette, and that is the building is too large, it has too much girth around the middle, and i would like to see a smaller building. i think it's very interesting. i would agree with what president miguel just said. it's an interesting way of giving texture and difference to a building. i don't think we have anything accept phillip johnson's building on california street, but that's a different story. i'm not sure whether or not the commission is open to asking for a slightly redesigned silhouette of the building, because in its current bulkyness i would have a hard time with this building. president miguel: commissioner antonini. commissioner antonini: well, i think, you know, i'm probably in favor of the building as it's now designed, but certainly we would work with

project sponsor for design. but i think that we've been -- staff has been working with them for quite a while now, and i think this is the type of size that needs to be done for this building to make sense. the only thing i would mention -- and this is a small element -- is one of your renderings, mr. fifer, appears to be sort of a smoky black glass to the building and others look blue. i always think the darker is a richer-looking building, particularly in the context of so much brick. in fact, the c-net building is one of my favorite buildings across the street, and it has a darker green. but that's certainly a discussion for another day and something that can be done as we move forward with that. and i do agree with commissioner lee that, you know, attracting companies from outside san francisco makes a lot of sense. and many of them -- most of them have moved their governmental departments to san francisco, because government is here.

they utilize legal accounting and advertising firms here, and they're starting to realize that their executive staff should be here a lot of times because -- and ultimately we can get more and more of that. google, of course, has had the site at hills plazzza that's been mentioned and we have splidse between the floors mostly because of this issue of connectivity of floors and broader floor plates, because for this type of thing we need a little more bulk to make the building work at the middle. and there's a reason for the design, you know. form mirrors function, and i think that's what we're seeing here. so i would like to move to approve, but i don't know if the commission feels we can do them together or if we should do them individually. >> as long as you include in your motion the ceqa findings. president miguel: right, the ceqa findings.

and we have the office allocation requirements, which should be no problem at all. and then the reclassification of the height, i believe, the 309 compliance on the three areas where there are exceptions, and then the remapping. >> i'll second. president miguel: commissioner olague. commissioner olague: i was kinds of hoping -- it's clear to me that we all want to approve some project on that site. i do appreciate the work that the department has done. i think it's a huge improvement over what was at the table originally, quite frankly, even though it might have caused some inconvenience to a project sponsor. but i would like to support the comments of commissioner moore. and i don't know if that would be to ask for a continuance so that maybe we could see some additional work on the silhouette of the building or what, but -- is that a motion? >> yeah, that's a motion to continue for a couple of weeks. >> i second that. >> how many? >> i don't know how long it

would take to sort of provide some kind of alternative. design. i mean, i don't know. i can't -- >> we have no time until october. >> october? president miguel: that's the soonest we have any time on the calendar that i know of. >> ok. and then we'll have this and then some -- >> it's on a different matter. >> oh, ok. >> so you're proposing a continuance to october 7? >> first available date in october. >> yeah. >> commissioners, there's a motion on the floor for continuance, which takes precedence over any other motion on the floor. on the motion for continuance, commissioner at