Inability to get out of your own way (Part 2)
Continued from part 1 . More design inanities now from DRB Stuck with the Santa Barbara direction, we were going to make lemonade out of lemons. We decided to make some great Santa Barbara architecture, absurd as it was, and sprinkle in modern style architecture as well. No dice. We went into the design review board and were promptly shut down. The board liked the architecture independent of each other but thought the juxtaposition between them was too jarring, fixating on the gable roofs versus the flat roofs. It was a fair point. We wanted to say that we were forced into this position from the irrationality of the city and we were just trying to get something in there that we thought would be in the best interest of the public, but of course, that would just lead to more tension. We instead argued that the roof forms are not so much a focal point in four story architecture as they are in one to two story architecture and that as long as the vocabulary of the design i...