The URL can be used to link to this page

Home My WebLink About11/26/2018 Item 2, Cooper Goodwin, Heather From:Allan Cooper <saveourdowntownslo@gmail.com> Sent:Wednesday, To:Advisory Bodies; Leveille, Brian; Craig Kincaid; Bell, Kyle Subject:1144 Chorro Street Attachments:411_21_18...lettertochc.pdf Dear Brian and Kyle - Would you kindly forward the letter attached below to the Cultural Heritage Committee before their Monday, November 26, 2018 meeting? Thank you! - Allan Allan Cooper, Secretary - Save Our Downtown, San Luis Obispo, CA Website: www.SaveOurDowntownSLO.com 1 To: Cultural Heritage Committee, Brian Leveille, Senior Planner and Kyle Bell, Associate Planner Re: 1144 Chorro Street From: Allan Cooper, Secretary Save Our Downtown Date: November 21, 2018 Honorable Chair Papps and Committee Members - We urge you to ﬁnd this building inconsistent with both the San Luis Obispo’s Historic Preservation Program Guidelines or with the Secretary of Interior Standards. Your Historic Preservation Program Guidelines state that new “…structures in historic districts shall be designed to be architecturally compatible with the district’s prevailing historic character as measured by their consistency with the scale…” and massing and that new “… development should not sharply contrast with, signiﬁcantly block public views of, or visually detract from, the historic architectural character of historically designated structures located adjacent to the property to be developed, or detract from the prevailing historic architectural character of the historic district.” The Secretary of Interior Standards states: “New construction should be appropriately scaled and located far enough away from the historic building to maintain its character and that of the site and setting.” We commend you for the stand you took with regards to the proposed four-story high 1027 Nipomo Street project. This project was clearly out of scale with the adjacent Creamery project and sharply contrasted with the character of the historically adjacent properties. So now we have before us a six-story mixed-use development with a maximum height of 75- feet within the Downtown Historic District towering above the 47 foot tall Wineman Hotel on Higuera Street and the 30 foot tall structures adjacent to it on Marsh Street. Any comparison with the Chorro Street parking structure is specious because 1) this structure lies outside the Downtown Historic District and 2) this City-owned structure was under no obligation at the time to conform to the Community Design Guidelines (in fact both the Palm Street and Chorro Street garages sought exceptions to the City's guidelines after they were implausibly categorized as “landmark buildings”). Your staff report for this project made reference to architect and professor Steven W. Semes, University of Notre Dame's Director of Graduate Studies for Historic Preservation, when justifying this building. The staff report makes the following statement: “At the 2007 National Preservation Conference, the distinguished architect and professor Steven W. Semes emphasized that new buildings in an historic setting should focus more on the “sense of place” than the “sense of time.” Semes’s point of view is that historic districts usually contain buildings in many different styles, but most follow an approach to design that reﬂects the sense of the speciﬁc place and create continuity over time rather than contrast and disruption.” In fact, Professor Semes was not arguing for more modernity in style. And besides, the 1144 Chorro Street project “style” is neither objectionable nor is it the focus of our concern. Professor Semes was arguing, quite the contrary, for maintaining a “continuous fabric of human-scaled streets and squares lined with decorous and mutually deferential buildings”. Perhaps most importantly, Professor Semes stated that we should only build what would make a good city, if there were to be many more such buildings. I’m including below key excerpts from a Professor Semes’ article which appeared in the December 2015 “New Criterion” issue. As I write this, I am spending three delightful weeks in Paris, France. But what is currently happening in San Luis Obispo is also happening here in Paris. There are increasing pressures to build taller and denser buildings in both of our city centers and all of this in the name of affordable housing. These pressures are not coming from the residents (60 percent of Parisians oppose new high rises in the city center) but are coming from deep-pocketed international corporations, architects, and politicians at City Hall. In conclusion, there is little to recommend this building in terms of maintaining the continuous fabric of human-scaled streets, nor is this project deferential to its surroundings. Please do not capitulate to current “top-down” pressures for taller buildings in our historical city center. Thank you! -Allan ___________________________________________________________________________ Steven W. Semes Excerpts from “Preserving the City of the Tomorrow” (the bold type is mine) “The best way to improve our cities may be to keep them the same.” December 2015 Paris, like many old cities, has been reinvented many times, from its days as a Roman town to the royal projects of Louis XIV and his successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The architects of Napoléon Bonaparte, Percier, and Fontaine, set the standard for the modern streetscape with their arcaded façade along the Rue de Rivoli, and the city was totally transformed in the nineteenth century by Napoléon III and his executive Baron Hausmann, becoming the exemplar of the modern city, to be imitated across the globe. But these makeovers were all intended to increase the orderliness and harmony of a city that had grown haphazardly; they were farsighted, based on a large-scale vision of the city as whole, and the new buildings complied with a wise architectural code and employed an architectural language that connected the present and the past, ultimately recalling the glory of that other great urban model, ancient Rome. The current drive to reinvent Paris, like those in the city’s past, is decidedly “top-down.”The rationale given for high-rise construction in the center was familiar: to boost the city’s economic competitiveness, to alleviate a shortage of housing (especially in the “affordable” range), and to “set an important new benchmark of urban and building sustainability.” While these are worthy goals, the public was not convinced that new high-rise towers were the appropriate response, and surveys show that over 60 percent of Parisians oppose new skyscrapers in the center. In summary, the claims of the politicians, developers, and architects for the necessity of these skyscrapers in Paris are groundless. The traditional city of a continuous fabric of human-scaled streets and squares lined with decorous and mutually deferential buildings is to be replaced by a collection of object- buildings, each a unique expression of its time. Paris must be reinvented—its new development “a gigantic experiment on the city,” in the words of CEU—or it risks becoming a “museum city” like Venice, a kind of aesthetic graveyard visited only by tourists. This is a laughable suggestion to anyone familiar with the vitality of the French capital. But whereas Paris in former centuries led the world in architecture and urbanism, today it is being asked to follow the lead of cities with which it has nothing in common. This aggressive aesthetic of “our time” is conspicuously at odds not only with our historic cities, but also with the real and pressing imperatives of our present conditions: climate change, urbanization, and the need for a sustainability that actually allows us to live together without foreclosing the quality of life for future generations. As the CEU report asks, “what if ‘the requirements of sustainable development’ include using what works; that is, what has already been sustained?” “Fragilely-funded Davids, we ﬁght for urban traditions that reach through the long and tumultuous history of Paris, defending them against the Goliaths of deep-pocketed international corporations, star architects, and politicians at City Hall.” The affordable housing argument is what the French would call a canard. The shortage of affordable housing has many causes, principally the stark disparity in proﬁt margins for developers in the luxury housing market in comparison to those building affordable units. Lynn Ellsworth of the preservation group The Tribeca Trust counters that “higher prices in historic districts reﬂect a huge untapped demand for more of what these districts offer, such as construction predictability, sunlight, architectural beauty, walkability, and livable density, the very things people want.” The creation, animation, and defense of distinctive places is an essential component of human well-being, and no amount of reinvention can substitute for its loss. While the “architecture of our time” has for nearly a century proved incapable of making cities and neighborhoods where people actually want to live, the architecture of our place galvanizes communities that create and care for their homes, streets, and civic spaces. First, add only what ﬁts in the place, not what does not belong there. This is not a difficult aesthetic judgment, but a simple recognition of what things belong together. Second, set a good example, by adding only what you want to see more of, knowing that any project thought to be successful will be imitated. We should only build what, if there were to be many more such buildings, would make a good city.