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 i think everyone's familiar

with. because of that increase in value many people that were buying these houses wanted to have larger houses. rather than tear down the house and build a large house, in both of these cases, you see two houses that have been joined together to create a larger structure. there was a lot of debate about it. the one on the top was probably the most successful. it has a two story sector. connector . you can barely see it. when you walk past is the only time you really see the two. the same is true with the one below, although in that case they decided rather than glass for the connector they'd use a very opaque plaster that would drop into the background as well. the object ive in both of these

cases was to keep the historic building. some features were changed, but you have the street scape. i'll show other examples of that later. it's important to remember that historic preservation is usually that of reuse. we're never preserving something -- even if we do a house [inaudible] that's an adaptive use. for example you think of the restoration that cca did down there, of course cannery row in monterey. the other thing secretary of interior standards can't do is density and use. because they are generally standards dealing with buildings and architectural features and elements it's hard to control use because zoning

tends to trump, to be the underlying as envelope for buildings, but i'd refer that [inaudible] fisherman's wharf. here, a set back was used so you distinguish the historic. and the right example is not a good example where the historic facade was directly on top of and if that case it disrupts your appreciation of the historic quality of the lower buildings. i think that's another good stopping point since i've given a bunch of examples. >> thank you. commissioners, questions or comments.

>> thank you for those last examples because i think what seems to me may be one of the most important things we need to look at isn't so much the residential infill because those are pretty strict and it relates a lot to the way the neighborhoods work, but it's more these low rise industrial districts, like south of market where there's a lot of development structure, there are historic structures, but they tend to be much lower density. so the question is is it better to preserve a one story building or should we start from scratch? we have a lot of examples of not very successful additions so i think we need to examine what's the best process for that. i think in large industrial districts where you have buildings that are being converted to a completely

different use and because they're industrial buildings, a lot of the materials are really corroded, they're very simple structures. could we have less strict standard? and then i think the third thing is to think about our commercial districts. some of a scrappy quality and preserve that quality, that good equality in the infill that's happening or new construction that's happening so i think those are the kind of neighborhoods we need to be focusing on. >> if i could just respond quickly. i would go back to my original premise, which is that every context is going to be different and have its historic context statement.

your standards don't end up being the same for every place so you end up with industrial areas so their significance would be very different. that's a very different context so you would identify it differently, evaluate it differently, landmark it somewhat in a different category and treat it differently because its significance is contained in different things. same way we had the historic question before, but there are examples of very historic buildings that don't have a lot of architectural integrity. the question is how do you create the right context for each of those places. you could create context for districts that say what are the essential elements to preserve. industrial districts will have

a very different answers that residential. >> thank you. commissioners? we'll open up to public comment again? any member of the public wish to speak? >> thank you again. dennis. you spoke about the concept of zoning and guidelines between historic >> it requires two things.

i requires a demand for those developments in another place. people would have a large zoning envelope and there would be no market to sell your development rights. and i think these can be very effective. i've seen them work in various places, new york and chicago would be high density city that is are a god example. houston doesn't have zoning, so it doesn't work there. but the question bums, is there a market. i have seen examples where small historic buildings can be saved so this is something you can think about with those industrial districts if there were a way to transfer zoning the vacant parcels so that at least significant portions of lower scale buildings could be saved. >> thank you. >> thank you commissioners, my

name is bruce, and i want to thank you all for having this. i want to thank doctor michael for joining us and i want to encourage staff to place this entire presentation on your website so people who have not been here have the opportunity with one click to be able to get this presentation. i think it will be very useful. commissioner, i'm very much in favor of what you had to say and i would agree with mr. antonari about the concept of use of tdrs. we are in a city where they can be very useful and i think that in certain industrial districts where height is not the issue, and i think that there are many of those, not necessarily pacific heights kind of historic districts, but western for an example, tdrs is a mechanism by which to avoid

problematic additions to low rise existing buildings that we want to retain. and i want -- i would ask that the commission give serious consideration to pushing that concept as it goes through this process. i do want to talk about the process and how you're doing all this with us, but i'll save that for the end. thank you. >> thank you. any other member of the public wish to speak on this item? >> i appreciate by the way, the format very much. it's very helpful for us, as well as you. couple things. i think the tdr program has been in place since 2005, which i think has been quite successful. i think we're more importantly we are looking very much at the tdr concept in the central soma plan for those blocks south of

market. i'd like to have a discussion here about that topic as we get more involved about this details of that plan which is probably about a year away from adoption. i think it's an important discussion and we want to make sure we're saving some of the kind of the finer grain nature of that neighborhood as well. if i may, and i apologize i was late, is there a separate discussion on the standard as applying to changes to existing buildings or is that -- >> so mr. michaels is going to go through and we'll have four or five different stopping points. i dead not read his presentation ahead of time. >> i've got more examples about [inaudible] tim can certainly correct me if i'm wrong, but a lot of our major conflicts are around that issue around how these standards apply to changes to existing buildings. that's where some of the more

-- the bigger conflicts we face often come into play, so it'd be good at some point to have that discussion as well. >> this might be a good spot to take a quick break, but we will make it quick, so five minutes if we -- thank you. >> it will be available to watch off of sfgov.tv for members who could not attend. looks like we're back. >> i will take the opportunity to come back to a couple slides so we can deal with the questions to changes to existing buildings because i did spend a lot of time on infill and additions. i'd like to reiterate what i keep starting with, which is

how to you get from context to treatment? how do you get from the historic significance of a property to a group of properties to how you treat it. if i could get my -- looking at fisherman's wharf and the hotel use and modernist details of and then one of the few national historic landmarks which moves, which are the cable cars. in each of these cases you're dealing with different architectural features of why you would or wouldn't designate a certain property so that's the first step, it's something you do for a district,

something you do for a particular landmark and it comes out of the historic context of why that's important. historic context become very important. i come from -- i spent many years in chicago as you heard in my biography and the image on the right is a house in old town in chicago and the lower level is a garage that was added right before they became a landmark district. if it was a landmark district you wouldn't add that on a lower level. through the bay area you have a different situation where this is a common occurrence. it's very -- so that become -- that's an example of how historic context is place specific. the first step, what is historic context and what are

the architectural features and how is that historic context reflected the buildings. i wrote an article from my role on the diversity committee of national trust. on the right you see a building in harlem in new york city. you see that the bay has been removed from the center, there's dramatic alteration to the first and second floor levels, window changes on the upper levels, but there are buildings that don't have what we call traditional historic integrity. but the significance of this property is this is where ralph edison wrote invisible man, so how is that conveyed by this site. in some cases it become how do you interpret the site? there was a discussion about

putting a plaque on a historic site. the real question here is what did the house look like when invisible man was written in it in 1947? maybe it's the knowledge of it, maybe it being aware of that that conveys the significance. and the building on the left is a forum. you can see a fair amount of alteration to the lower level, but its significance is largely historical . the interior actually has some surviving features, including a arch and sort of a stage area, no seating but a stage area on the upper hefl. level. you can see it's a larger place. that's the place where the open space would be arguably

significant because it was a gathering place, major events held there, the windows have all been changed, but again, the historic context what's really significance is what happened. the question become how about the historic context reflected in the building and is the goal in these cases architectural restoration. in the case of the forum we have not been able to locate the original architect or drawings despite extensive looking so we have to deal with photographic and documentary evidence, which comes from historical significance. in either of these cases i think restoring the property to its original architectural condition would not necessarily

be appropriate. this brings under the question on standard one, which of course says property will be used for historic purpose, for place and use that requires minimal change. these are a couple examples that staff provided the recent issues where the goal in the historic -- the goal for designation was to commemorate a historic site, but in both cases you can't preserve the things that are there. i understand the city is looking at the question of intangible heritage, how to we do that, how do we designate or create some sort of review process for that. this is not something the secretary of interior standards can do. the issue that comes up again and again, because in a lot of

cases there are types of uses that people are very connected to that really are a historic -- that are significant and create a historic context. the question is how can this building no longer relate that history. and interestingly in these cases, there's no protection of the use, but in both cases the original names of the store have to stay on the outside because they're part of the landmark designation. so macy's has to make do due with awnings, but still have

the signs. standard three is another big question. it's something i started noticing around 1990 where you saw additions that were very difficult to tell from the original. the building on the left that's the original building and the building on the right is a 1990 addition. it's almost spot on and really hard to see the difference. i would argue this one creates a false sense of history. the problem with false sense of history is it's not contained in style. i happened to be looking at these two images together and thinking which building is newer, this 1920s shopping plaza in kansas city or the

heavily restored mission at cornell. and much of the contemporary fabric would be even newer than that on the right. the building on the right, is it trying to create a false sense of history or just a congenial environment? and then the question of compatible but differentiated. standard nine, new additions, exterior alterations shall not destroy [inaudible]. people have taken a historic property and shaved off the back wall and added on to it , which actually conforms to secretary of interior standards.

you can see the addition, because there's no property next door. if there were a property next door it wouldn't be very visible are the street either. at the same time we can see examples like the ones on the wright you see a historic 8 or 10 story building where they've added to the top and left of it a different material, but i'd argue that's too dramatic a change. it's very much differentiated. the one on the left you might think that's going to be compatible, but could create a false sense of history. i'm not going to argue that there's a real fine line between standard three and nine. it's a balancing act you have to keep coming back to. i'm going -- i'll give you one

large example. here's the historic building with a modernist addition, but i'll give this example, which i did for national trust a number of years ago and it addresses the difference between standard three and nine and addresses the questions as to why it hinders architectural design. there's a property in wisconsin. it's arguably the first concrete building in the united states. it was built with what they called line mortar, grout construction, poured building in 1984. it was also built by an abolitionist and is the only documented underground railroad site in the state of wisconsin and is a national landmark

because of that historic association and not its architectural significance. so five little shops have been added on to it. in the 1850s and changed in the 1860s, by the 1890s they looked like this. there was a canopy room that had been removed. the day after it was given to the local historical society, four of those five buildings on the right collapsed and so they were lost so for many years what was preserved was just the building and the first and then the historical society wanted to build an addition, and that got everyone mad. everyone was upset with this addition. it was strikingly modern, it was unadorned, ed, unpopular

with everyone. it doesn't create a false sense of history, but it's on the same site where there were buildings of that scale, mass and size. how did it happen? and part of the way it happened was that there was no architectural -- there wasn't this process that this commission undertakes and that goes on here. they did a lot of fund raising based with that historic photo and this modern building as it looked in the 1890st.

i found, as i said before, it was a perfect storm. the biggest problem had to do with architectural design in this case. the architect said he wanted to use contemporary built up panel construction, but all the fund raising had been done with this assumption you'd get historic recreation so there was a fundamental [inaudible] in that regard. there was dumbing down that happened in the review process. it was exacerbated by the fire process at the time too. the building caught between modern and historic was as as a result of the design process as the review process, but as i said before, there isn't a

sharp line, even though there is a sharp line in this building between standards three and nine. i think that's another good stopping point. >> commissioners, any questions or comments. commissioner pearlman. >> i love that example. i mean, it is unbelievable. i can't even understand why don't the windows align. it's really bizarre. >> it's like the windows moved between the two designs. >> so odd. you know, we have -- in implementing the standards here, especially standard nine, i think it's great we're reviewing this because i know there are some imperatives that have become rules that when we set back we have to setback a certain distance as opposed to look at the ton context around it as well as the structural lines in the building, how do we respect the building while

still adding to it so to me this has always been one of the biggest challenges and i'm so glad we're reviewing this particular one right now because in san francisco this has been a particular bone of contention. >> we have a lot of words in the standard so in a guideline, would you say it's better to have a statement about balancing rather than some more words. of course it would be words in discussing balancing, but i'm trying to get your gist why -- go further. or maybe you just have a photograph bach or something to show. a photograph book or something to show. >> i hate to say more words,

but, you know, you have these two issues, one is a false sense of history. we have to balance are we creating or not creating a false sense of history in this compatible or differentiated design. that's what you're trying to balance. in some ways i'd simplify it down to those two concepts. >> wording along those two lines. >> that's good, thanks. >> we'll open up to the public. any member of the public wish to speak at this time? >> i'm with san francisco victorian alliance and owner of a historic home. many of our members have come to us to say that they are frustrated with the historic planning process if they choose to add elements or in some cases restore the facade of their