Design: Outlawing the Modern Skyscraper

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In fact it is Manhattanization of a more romantic kind that the architectural guidelines--expressly seek. San Francisco's stylistic models are the great tapering spires of the 1920s and early '30s--Chrysler, Empire State--that followed New York's own seminal zoning law. Ironically, those epochal skyscrapers would not be permitted by San Francisco's new height limits. North of Market Street, the city's main commercial boulevard, a post-plan building can rise only about 30 stories. Even south of Market, where the planners intend to encourage new construction, no skyscraper will be much more than 40 stories, and a slender 40 stories at that. Henceforth, "distinctive" building tops are obligatory--parapets, domes, obelisks, the fancier the better. Pilasters and serious cornices, both virtually prohibited until now, have been declared virtuous. Says Planning Director Dean Macris: "We think it is time for a departure from the International Style."

New buildings will hark back to the old, and bona fide old buildings will be saved from demolition. The plan labels 250 downtown buildings "significant" and inviolable and uses a clever mechanism for compensating owners of those urban museum pieces. The trick is "transferable development rights": the owners of the old Curran Theater, for instance, cannot tear down the theater, but they could sell the hypothetical air rights to a developer across town.

Taken together, local architects and builders reckon, the rules will add between 5% and 10% to the cost of construction. A separate, crypto-Scandinavian set of provisions will add another 10%: a developer will be obliged to pay about $9 per sq. ft. to subsidize mass transit, build a new downtown park and child-care centers, and buy art for the building's public spaces.

What price charm? The 950,000-sq.ft. annual building cap, a recent addition to the plan as a sop to the strong local anti-growth sentiment, does not really seem so onerous. "The plan puts a definite damper on development, and I think that's good," says Mayor Feinstein. "This is a small and delicate city. I'm only sorry it took us so long to learn that lesson."

More problematic than the cap itself will be administering it. Vast power will devolve on the planning director. Of ten buildings proposed next year, say, how to choose which two or three get the go-ahead? How to prevent favoritism and influence buying? Macris says he may assemble a panel of nationally well-known architects to do the judging for the city. The mandarin bureaucracy grows.

Still, the scheme is right minded. For all their controversy, the guidelines tend only to codify San Francisco's natural inclination toward the picturesque and small scale, the quaint and the quirky. "San Francisco," says Jeffrey Heller, a politically nimble local architect, "has always been a fussy and difficult place to build." --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Jane Ferguson/San Francisco