basically direct people to document what they're doing when they're dealing with the property so five distinctive features or examples of craftsmanship shall be preserved and then it goes into surface cleaning. and then six, historic features shall be repaired rather than replaced. this is one that has caused confusion over time. it says severity of [inaudible] match the old in design color temperature and design color qualities. the example of this is the replacement window. and the real question is, again, a process question. the question isn't what type of window should i replace it with. the question is do i need to replace the window, is it severely deteriorated as standard six says and if so,

the new should match the original and does not change the features as you can see on the right with the basic aluminum clad window which has altered the historic appearance of the building. standard 7 and 8 -- 7 is mentioned sandblasting again, surface cleaning. that was more of an issue in the past than the present. and standard 8 is the idea of repair rather than replace. you want to fix something if it's fixable, especially if it's an important feature to replace the property.

the final ones, i think the ones we'll spend much of today talking about are standards 9 and 10 are new additions and alterations. nine focuses on not destroying historic materials and says the new work shall be differentiated from the old and shall be compatible with the scale and architectural features. this is the area of great confusion. you can see that example from new york city where they stuck a skyscraper within a historic [inaudible] building and that is not compatible. the question that i think we'll spend time on is the conflict between [inaudible] which says don't create a false sense of history, and number nine, which differentiates new work from old, but is compatible. it's the difficult thing in some cases to do.

and then number ten is the principle of reverse blt. reverse blt. if you're going to do something don't do it in a way that you can't restore the property to the way it was before. i want to share one example and then i'll stop. this is a property on the left, a jehovah's witness property which happened at the beginning of the first preservation law in new york city. the property you see is very strikingly modern. this was an approved addition. in 1966 the idea was you differentiated the new from hold. old. if you fast forward about 20 years you see the building on the left here much closer to the historic structures and the arrangement of the windows and the rhythm between the solid

wall and the glazed openings, but obviously a modern building in materials. if you fast forward to a couple years ago, here is a one story taxpayer mattress store in brooklyn heights and in fact, the review process here created a new building similar to those on the block. there has been a very different -- as the kind of styles and architecture that we like to build has changed dramatically over the last 45 years and during that time the secretary of interior standards have not changed much. these basic ideas, how they've been applied in terms of guidelines have changed. i think i will stop at that point and retain questions and comments.

>> commissioners, any questions or comments? commissioner pearlman. >> this is very helpful. i had a quick question about the hurs building in new york. i don't know the process they go through in new york, but certainly doesn't meet standard ten and, you know, the reverse ability one is always a question because no one's removing a high-rise building from the context. it's always a funny one about buildings that change in time. i'm working on the bank here that will never be a bank again, but we spent a year-and-a-half talking about the [inaudible] and the reverse blt is that we have to save every piece of it on site in case we have to put it back together again. can you talk about that. . >> that example is a good one.

what were the defined characteristics. in some of these cases there's a number of examples of the giant glass high-rise building in some type of historic shell, you can find them in almost every city and some haven't been approved by landmarks commissions or secretary of interior, it's just something that a developer decided to do and in those cases they're really not reversible in any way. in some cases it could be that just the facade and architectural features on the outside of the building were what was considered significant. i could see a case significance is conveyed by the facade and not the interior. that's becoming less true.

washington dc is famous for examples of facadism like that. >> i'm interested -- this may come up later in your presentation -- in the process and comments on the national process or other locals on integrating other public goals, for instance environmental goals for energy efficiency, climate change, materials and let's just say over the course wants to change the building and how do they integrate that with these standards? >> oh, absolutely. those are very important. in fact, i just led a workshop with the trustees of the national trust and with our san francisco field office director on climate change and that's something that the trust is very concerned with today. i think it's the same issue, you have a balancing act. you have a balancing act on other provisions of a zoning

code and historic preservation commissions and i'll show examples later where the most simple conflict you'd find would be a con flict of density where you have a small historic structure in a zone that's allowed to be larger, how do you add on to that. similarly with energy efficiency, fortunately if you avoid the 1945 to '75 period when buildings were not made terribly efficiently, often the pre-1930 buildings will perform quite well, but in terms of adding new things for example are solar panels. often people will object to those on aesthetic ground, so that's an area where i think it's important balancing act. if you go to places like -- best example would be germany where there's extensive

landmark laws, also extensive solar panels, they've just made an exception and allowed them. >> tank you. thank you. because of the timeline issue, i'd like to recognize supervisor wiener. would you like to come up and speak at this point because i know you're under a tight schedule. >> good afternoon. i apologize budget committee went a little long. thank you for holding this hearing and workshop because i think it's very important. as i know you know in 2012 when we passed the update to article 10 and 11, we included a requirement to move forward the process around or local interpretation of the secretary interior standards and i also know that heritage came out with a really join report on recommended changes or new approaches to historic preservation in san francisco

and i'm really thrilled to see that the general process of sort of taking a step back and looking at how we approach preservation in san francisco and how we can make sure that we have really strong and robust historic perez preservation in our city, who i will acknowledging we are a living urban center with a lot of needs for urban housing and parks and so forth. this is terrific and thank you for doing this. i look forward to the process. >> thank you. do we have any questions or comments before public comment? we'll open up public comment. we'll do two minutes each because we'll have multiple opportunities to speak today. any member of the public wish to speak on this first section?

>> i'd just like the committee to pay attention to those last three slides. raymond, residents of san francisco and owner of a house on the national register on page street and member of the victorian alliance. i like to hope the committee pays attention to the evolutionary process of interpreting these standards. you know, i just returned from brooklyn myself and i think maybe not in manhattan, but in brooklyn they're doing things well and i liked the 2009 way of interpreting the standard compared to the one 20 years earlier. and we -- myself and other members of the victorian alliance worried that the context is not taken into account often enough and we kind of get lost in the details and the emphasis on the

differentiation and we lose getting a compatible structure that looks historical but is plainly different and doesn't take away from it like that glaringly modern one from 1966. please pay attention to that. i think we' 're still behind on trying to get reasonable changes in building that are historic. >> thank you. >> thank you. i have two questions. one, the standards don't seem to relate at all to internal features of a building. and how do they relate, if at all to that, and that's my first question. my second question is the relative importance of the history of a building in terms

of what occurrences happen there versus the architecture of the building and how those standards relate to both those questions. thank you. >> yeah. actually mr. michaels could respond real quick. >> yeah. those are actually excellent questions because first of all the standards do ask for contractor defining features which can be an interior space. ? in general, most jurisdictions will only look at interior spaces in two ways, one in how they're perceived from the exterior so you don't see a wall from middle of a window, and second would be public spaces so for example in using tax credit projects, let's say a historic house, they might look at the main public space. they will generally not be

looking at kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, things like that. in public buildings it would be a lobby space, not office space. the second question was the -- the history that occurred in the building -- i'll give examples of that. with looking at the standards and the problem we have with [inaudible] and without being too academic about it, that comes from a history of a strong architectural involvement in preservation from the 1930s to the 1980s. there is a movement right now especially to recognize communities which have historically been overlooked, that have historic sites that

don't have a lot of traditional architectural integrity so what is important about conveying that. i'm giving a couple examples later in this presentation from the african american community, but we had a presentation for the cesar chavez monument. where he kept running into integrity issues. >> thank you. >> [inaudible] san francisco

and actually, i know brooklyn heights really well. i lived there for many years. i know brook loon. lyn very well. i have to wonder when i look at the last one they showed using is why when there's no historic building demolished, why is it progress to build a new building that looks like it was there from the 1890s and that in terms if the standard says no false historicism other elements that make a building appropriate in an historic district, which are really about scale and materials. it doesn't have to look like it's 130 years old.

>> any other member of the public wish to speak at this point? yes, sir. >> hello, i'm skeeter jones and i agree with that. we're talking about preservation and all of us probably have an image of a fantastic building in a great neighborhood and sure, we should keep it. but what's happened in san francisco and what i've seen over about 35, 40 years here, is the buildings were changed. they were stuccoed, they were asbestos shingles and there's very little that's historic with them. but to build a new facade it's very difficult to build. these buildings were destroyed. they were built 100 years ago. even the neighborhoods don't look like that anymore. they've all been modernized. now we're going back 50 years

saying that whatever was built no matter what is now historic. i think there should be some provision in there that these buildings that have been changed to be able to build historic facade of the period if there are no objections from the neighbors and instead of this false historicism -- most people i say what's wrong with that to take a building that was destroyed more than 50 years into some modern piece of architecture that has no significance and so i wonter wonder why we can't go back and go to the period. >> i think we do a reasonable job here in san francisco to identify the history in a building as opposed to the architecture itself. there's two landmarks, the marcus bookstore which is about

what happened there, not specifically the architecture, and the 2362 market street is where the aids memorial quilt was started and made because of what happened in the building. the building is pretty insignificant in architecture. i think we recognize that particular part of the process. a: thank you. >> thank you. any member of the public wish to comment. we'll move on. director ram, do you have any comments? >> i just want to say thank you. i think this is a long time coming. we want to make sure we get this right and i'm happy to have this format and discussion moving forward. thank you all. >> thank you director. mr. michael. >> thank you again. and i appreciate all the comments because i think there has been on ongoing challenge in what creates a false sense of history. the other sense we have is we

live an eclectic time. there's certain styles of architecture that can point to a certain period of time. we live in a time when there's a whole huge range of styles so it become more difficult. this is a good example, this is

a 1903 daniel designed library in joliet. it had an addition in 1990, opened in 1991, that from a distance looks very much like the original building, but when you get close you can see the differentiation because the stone is different and in fact, the patterning of the rough and smooth stone is different so there's a fairly obvious line on the exterior and interior, but from a distance it tends to look like the historic. this is an example on the south bai. bay. on the left is historic buildings and next to it are buildings they added in 1966. now, this one can't be mistaken because it has a big 1996 in the [inaudible] on top of the

[inaudible] there. i guess the question -- to me the big question is what can the secretary of interior standards do because they condition tell you about architectural style. we went through the ten standards and they don't ever talk about style, but they can promote more sensitive infill in historic districts. the image on the top shows what the district looked like historically. this is in chicago, but it could be in new york, sort of brown stone, these three story gray, brown and other kind of stone building. and then the bottom you can see a couple of examples from infill from the 1980s. you see buildings that don't come up to the sidewalk in this case, lower scale, very different type of design. on the left you can see a historic quality in terms of having brick, but doesn't match the historic building in the setback. you can see that what become

really important in sensitive infill in historic district is matching the rhythm of the street and in both of these cases these buildings do not do that. after the area became a historic district in the early 1990s you get builds such as below here. in some cases you could argue there's a false sense of history. the gray stones on the left look like they've been there for 100 years but they are in fact a 1990s design. the ones on the right i think are easier to differentiate. again, it fits in in terms of the setback, height and range of materials. and i think those are the important things when you look at the question of infill. and these are some examples from charleston, south carolina. the guidelines for infill generally look at the question of being compatible and this is

what the standard says. compatible with the massing, size, scale and features. for example, that's why we get a false sense of history in a building that looks like a exact replica of a victorian building. what become most important is the massing size and scale. scale is the most obvious. setbacks are something that are very important as well in terms of how a building sits on the street, if it's massing, how it fits in with other parts of the community it's in and then the rhythm and pattern of solids and voids for opening in solid wall. that is very important as well. finnishes, materials and fae features are the last quality you look ate. you can see this example of a new building in charleston that in some ways gapes in and in other ways doesn't ape the

historic architecture above. there are a couple other examples where lands mark laws and a chicago example that were new buildings that were out of scale and avoiding the setback. if you look at these examples, really the biggest problem isn't even so much the opening of the styles of buildings. here there's a difference where the building on the right try to ape materials of the old buildings in terms of having a brick facade, but you see the scale is wrong. they don't match up with the buildings around them. a modern design would be less disruptive for the street scape.

the example above was a building that was put in prior to designation of this area in 2002. the image on the left below is the historic street gate and the image on the right is a building that was added after the designation. again, using some of the architectural features in the district. so they can promote more sense of infill. this is society hill in philadelphia. this is where you see like brooklyn, very modern buildings that were added and approved long ago. you'll see some like this image

on the top that i think fits in but is not historic. below you're seeing some size issues that have less to do with the historic district, but the point is that building on the corner is a very contemporary interpretation. now, the challenge with some of these places is you've had a district since the 1970s so those buildings are getting to an age of historicty themselves. we cannot promote a particular style. styles come and go, styles change, styles are reinterpreted. even the names we use have changed over time and i'd chal lenge you to find two architectural style books which use the same designations over time. they're all different from one book to the next. but what enhances the historic context and what is compatible.

there's often a lot of debate. these are a couple examples from palo alto. in many ways this is an apple store in palo alto on university avenue. there's a range of architectural styles on what's a nice historic street. a lot of terra cotta and mission style buildings. in this case the apple store fills a gap that was not historically there and some people would argue in this case that a glass front like this is less disruptive because it doesn't draw attention to itself and it is clearly differentiated. i understand you're dealing with a similar issue here in union square. the question, again, become not one of style, but one of how

does this deal with what's there historically and if you look at the whole collection of all ten standards, how do you evaluate a set of guidelines that makes sense for a particular district? it won't be the same for every district just as it isn't the same for every place. there's a historic district and an architect deseened house you see on the lower right in the historic district. the local preservation commission approved it, the neighbor across the street was very upset about it.

basic idea the secretary of interior standards is not to regulate infill and construction as much as it is to preserve what we have. i'm showing two examples from old town in chicago. this is an example of something