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 home that was built 70,

80, 90, 100 years ago and they are frustrated and feel the path they want to do with their own home is being blocked by the planning department in the interpretations of number 10 and 11 of how the historic -- the secretary of interior standards are interpreted for homes, individual homes. and i know a lot of discussion we've had today is about commercial use or adaptive reuse in districts that will be undergoing significant changes. i want to bring you back to a significant number of people who own their own homes and are frustrated and unable to restore or rehabilitate their homes to what they feel is the context of their particular neighborhood. >> thank you. any other member of the public wish to speak? seeing none, i'll move to next

section. >> i guess i'm going to spend a little more time on additions and construction, but i think this next slide is very helpful in looking at this question and it may apply to some extent when dealing with things where people want to bring back features as well. to recall, i talked about size scale, massing and rhythm and location is also important. this is a good example of the right and wrong way to approach additions and new construction and this is largely doling with residential properties so you see on the upper left location, obviously adding on to the rear of a property where you're not disturbing the historic street scape is much better than adding on to the front of the property. in terms of scale additions that defer to the original scale of the property are

preferential to those that would overwhelm or equal the scale of the property. then you have the question of rhythm, you can see an example there. some buildings tend to have a vertical rhythm or a modern or art deco -- a building may have a horizontal rhythm to it whereas a historical building may have a vertical rhythm to it. massing is somewhat different than scale. can you see the original massing of the property? i'm going to give a couple examples. these are not frank lloyd wright, but they're similar prairie style. the center one, these were considered small for the standards of the suburb that they were in so people wanted to add on to the center property. there was controversy about this, but arguably it followed some of the rules.

what it did was added a similar block to that square prairie style structure on to the back, connect td by a glass piece to make a much larger house. the argument here is that it's added on to the back so again, from the front of the property you don't really see it, but some people were still upset with that conclusion that this was approved by a commission and through the secretary of interior standards because the idea was in massing, scale and rhythm that deferred to the original. back to this question of density, i mentioned this is probably the most dramatic example where they shave the back off the house. in this case they sweetened the deal by restoring elms on the front. this property had lost a lot of the front features. the trade off for that was that they shaved off the become wall and you happen to be able to

see this one from a parking lot. if you look at it from the side they created five houses out of one. this -- it's interesting because what happened is this was in a park outside of chicago and what happened was -- two things happened. one, there was several examples of what happened so actually the city counsel went back and said we've got these individual houses that are in high zoning districts apdz they went back and changed the zoning on some of these areas so they wouldn't have to deal with a lot of these. but it is this basic issue found on town send that the standards themselves are not going to change density. transfer of development rights is a useful solution. this was a more successful one. there was original proposal to demolish these two properties and then they instead added on to the rear, but this is almost

invisible unless you're right in front of the houses that they've been converted into multiple units in the back. and the question is, what are significant features as viewed from the public right of way. you get the same question as historic context. are you able to do that? are you able to see the historic context, feel it, going by it? and in both these cases like the earlier one, what you you also saw in addition were missing features. this is a property that won a national trust preservation honor award a couple years ago, the american brewery in national obviously built a wonderful union with that second roof. this is what it looks like on the front, this is the his toreing con teksz. if you go to the back because it's not a brewery anymore, you

get the glass addition, which is a clearly differentiated structure. this won and honor award. i think it's an office building at this point. here's a good example of the questions of additions from seattle, good and bad in terms of the questions set back in materials. the one on the left i would argue because the addition is set back, it's a contrasting material and you can pretty much see the historic building, whereas the one on the right is not set back, it repeats the rhythm of solid and void as the element below so tends to intrude on the property more. in greenwhich village they have

this problem with towers that hang out of those historic buildings.

and the question of facade is one that's been very right. is it really valuable? and part of the problem comes back to this process. how did you -- what did you say the historic context was? what did you identify as the historic fee chours? atures? if you identify only the facade, this is always to

some extent, a danger. i think i'll stop there again and leave time for more questions and try to come back to some of the specific concerns. >> thank you. commissioners, questions or comments. seeing none, we'll open up to the public. any member of the public wish to speak? seeing none we'll close public comment and bring it back -- >> one question about that last example with the [inaudible] on top. you mentioned -- is it that the width of the street such that you can't see the tower because it's set back enough? and what was in those buildings? was that put back in the construction? >> the new construction did recreate the floor levels of

the buildings because they did line up. >> what is the problem if the context it is the same as it was before because i can't see if that's 20 stories or 120 stories. and number two, is there value in the material of those floors that were taken out and put back with some modern that material? what is the problem with that when i walk down the street and it feels exactly as it did before the tower -- >> it's interesting. because it was a historic district, those are individual landmarks i think you'd have a harder time doing that, but because it was a historic district and the context was the facade, the great iron y of

that project was that the front buildings you saw, one was about 1906, the others about 1900 and the other had elements going back to the 1970s. you realized the rear they were demolishing was actually older than the facade so maybe if they had done a better job at the front of of identifying materials you might have seen a better solution. that's true. that is an exceptionly narrow street where you can't see the connection to the upper spees piece from the street and if you go across the street it can read as a separate building. you can't make a blanket statement that all facadism isn't going to make sense. in some cases it will be the only historic thing going on. >> thank you. anything else. mr. michaels, move forwarding with the next section.

>> i think what i'd like to do is come back to this question since it was brought up, of changes to individual properties. it's really standards five and six. distinctive features, the documentation that you go to replace missing features. standard six, deteriorated features shall be restored rather than replaced. before you decide on replacing a window, you should decide whether they need to be replaced at all. but when coming to adding features that may have been

there in the past, [inaudible] or pictorial evidence so the illustration i'm showing here is a 1898 house where the porch was altered in the past and the owner has brought an original blueprint that shows the historic porch with a bell strait on it. in addition to that documentary evidence, they were able to come up with new architectural evidence to restore the [inaudible] which is not yet restored in the picture before because there was a shadow on the brick wall. so you had forensic evidence from the site where you could show where the missing piece had been and in this case you have the original blueprints that show how it was built. historic photographs were important as well.

this is a good example of how the process works. if you look at standard six it says, what is preservation? preservation is fixing things rather than replacing them. if it can't be fixed, replace it with something that matches the original. you'll notice the standard in that middle sentence emphasizing the visual qualities and/or possible materials. we often get the question from building owners do you have to use wooden windows? in a sense the material -- the actual materiality of it is less important and the value of a historic wood window can't be rep licated in a modern wood window, but you want something that matches the original. if you look at the two windows there you see the dramatic distinction between the replacement and original

windows in terms of the profile. then the second question, which is to show how a feature was there historically and whether it should be brought back. and this relates back to that false sense of history where you don't have conjectural features or architectural [inaudible]. i guess i wanted to dwell on some of those standards since we spent a lot of time on standards three and nine and had that discussion and maybe it would be useful to look at these for a moment to see if there are discussions. >> commissioners? no. any public comment? yes, sir. >> my name's jim and i'm with victorian alliance.

this is precisely one of the areas that we are looking at constantly. we understand there's always a desire to be as correct and well documented as possible in seeking restoration or whatever on a project. and what we've heard, especially from small homeowners who buy a place, want to restore it and get into the process, very often they're given such a high standard that very often they opt to do nothing. instead of being greeted with wow, that's great, we want to support you in doing this, it's we're going to give you a million hurdles to go through, it's going to be expensive and

a horrible process for you to go through. so developers avoid it, homeowners are often discouraged and especially while, you know, we support good preservation and as accurate as possible, especially for the small homeowner intend on doing something right for his home, our stand would pretty much be that we would like to see hpc and planning really a adopt a very supportive posture that reaches out to people who have good intent and aids them through the process and encourages them . you know, again, sadly the conjectural comments we got is that's not where we are right now and moving this as we re-examine the our interpretation of the secretary of interior standards is our goal. thank you.

>> thank you. >> commissioners, i'm jim, i serve on the city hall preservation commission, along with two of my colleagues who are here today. i'm delighted to be here. as supervisor wiener said this is a very important exercise and requires a lot of work and should involve as many people as possible. i think you're extremely fortunate to have doctor michael as your presenter. there's probably few people in the country that has this expertise to do the job as well and i hope you will keep him in some capacity to provide you with additional input over the course of the work. i was a member of the federal advisory commission on historic preservation in the '70s when the secretary of standards were

prom gaited to the tax issues and have watched over the years how that has evolved and how the sec retary of standards has gone from that purpose to a lot of other purposes. the secretary of standards are not wholly writ and do not need to be interpreted with strict construction. they need to be looked at in a very broad way and that's one of the values for creating your own guidelines. this exercise should create what works for san francisco within those broad guidelines and i think the most important goal should be to free things up so that people have a choice, so that -- as the gentleman from the victorian alliance mentioned, that people

feel they're involved in the process, not just being told they can't do something, and somebody wants to rebuild their garage in the old fashioned, they can do so. thank you. >> thank you. any other member of the public wish to speak at this time? seeing none, we'll close public comment and mr. michaels? >> back ahead, i think i would echo -- i think we're picking up on the mic. >> am i on now? sorry, i'm just trying to get to the slide. i'm going to echo the comment that was just made. it really is important to do what this commission is doing

which is to create specific design guidelines and i think you need to consider that you have different context too. it's a compact city, but a large city. different districts have different qualities and different his toreing context. i take you back to the first idea which starts with the bird charter, starts with the international purchase to preservation, which are also embodied in the secretary of standards, which are identify, evaluate, register and treat. we tend to focus whether looking at the standards or pictures of changes, on that last part of that sentence, treat, the last part of the process, but by the time you get to treatment you should have registration or a landmark designation that tells you, gives you guideline going forward so that the homeowner comes in can look at the designation and get a sense of what makes sense for their individual property or their historic district, that it

would not be a surprise. that comes out of the evaluation that is done. what is significant in this area, what are the significant historic features and the example i gave with ground level garages, the difference that you find between the barrier and other parts of the country is a good example of a local condition that is very different from what you'd find on the east coast or somewhere else. the importance i think is the process, what is the historic context and ideally when talking about design guidelines it's very difficult to create one set of guidelines for an entire city. in some cases you'd need to be specific to certain areas or at least types of buildings. a couple of images from the mission here, what are the significant historical and architectural features. minnesota commented on the

particular characteristics that the mission would want to preserve, but didn't relate to the architectural elements. what is the context? context gives you significance so you can identify an evaluate. how is that significance reflected ntd built environment? that's architectural, but could have other features as well. if question is not to forestall change or say something can't happen, but to manage that change so that the significance is retained. we talked about some examples of the difference between residential and industrial, commercial properties like this or mixed use will also have a very different connection to significance. commercial properties change much more than residential properties. store fronts change every few years, whereas residential properties may not change for more than a generation or more. and some of those changes

obtain significance in their own right. i'd go back to that concept as well. i think when people were talking about the mission, for example, they were talking about colorful alterations as opposed to the original architecture. this really sort of comes to the end of my presentation, so i'd like for whatever time the commission and public had left, really come back to some of these questions and try to facilitate some discussion ordeal with examples if you want to. >> what i'd like to do is talk about what the future holds and scheduling and have the public made aware of our different steps. mr. fry. >> as you recall, when you first requested this hearing it was during our discussion about the budget for next year and at that time we committed to

bringing a public participation plan. in the meantime we will be setting up a website that will include more information for the public that wants to be involved. for members of the public, they're in the invitation that went out, there was a link to sign up to remain connected to us regarding future events. if you don't have that in the top right hand corner, there is an email sign up button which includes any department activities related to historic preservation. if you're on that list we can update you and keep you updated, but our goal is, after hearing from the public, mr. michaels' presentation and any

comments you have to regroup, establish some goals for how we want the schedule and plan to play out this fall and bring it back to you in the fall for your review and consideration. >> thank you. any other comments from commissioners? >> i have an overall comment, and maybe mr. michael can respond too. i think we need to think about why are we doing design guidelines and what's the goal for this whole process and to make sure we've established that very clearly.

i'm not exactly sure how specific or unspecific we want to be. >> sure, well, i would go back to concept i had, which is really what does the secretary of interior standards give you in terms of how you deal with districts. you can boil it down to ideas of context, scale, massing, materials, without dictating or hindering architectural design.

i think that scale setbacks, massing rhythm of solids and voids, those are things you can talk about in different places and they come out of the standards to a large extent. they provide a template without dictating, i think a style or design. i mean, a lot of people argue this zoning dictates zoning too. some communities have undertaken something and i don't really recommend it myself, but there's been a movement to do form based codes where people actually create zoning codes that talk very specifically about more than just massing, size, scale, and rhythm of buildings. i was looking for examples of modern row houses that don't look like historic houses that fit in pretty well in terms of

rhythm and massing. i have a couple examples of those, but not a lot. and then you find in some historic districts, again, if you look back to the standard that every property changes over time, districts are also evidence of changes over time so the fact that people had to add a gas station in the 1920s or that they added a hotel when a certain event happened or something like that, sometimes you want some of those layers of history as opposed to just one period of significance. i'm going to take advantage of your question to talk about one of the things we've been talking about, the national trust in discussion with parks service. we began a discussion with them asking do we need to change