AMAP: A 21st Century Diverse Approach to Preservation

About the Talk:
Designing buildings to fit with the dense and historic urban fabric of San Francisco is a very delicate prospect with potholes and mine fields at every step. Preservation, of course, is not a science. Knowing what to keep and what to let go of in the process of the evolution of a place is a delicate and tricky dance. With the frenetic pace of change, social pressures and the sheer volume of building over the past half-decade, discernment is extremely important.

Explains Jonathan Pearlman, “As a member of San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Commission, my participation in this debate is one way I can contribute to preserving and furthering the story of San Francisco. I was trained to think about buildings: When was it built? Who was its architect? What is its style? How was it built, and how does this building define its place in the stream of architectural history?

There is, however, so much more to the story: Why was this building built in the first place? What meaning does it convey? Does it represent a person, a group or a culture? Was it the backdrop to something important that happened there? What has been most revealing to me is to see how in San Francisco, there is not a reliance on just buildings to define its history; rather, we are seeking to intertwine the story of San Franciscans, adding a socio-cultural memory to the built fabric as grounding to prepare us for the future.

“I have had the honor of working on a number of landmark buildings in San Francisco, including one of the most significant, The Hibernia Bank Building located on Jones at Market Street.”  This early Beaux Arts Classical building rode out both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes with little damage. The project was to restore and update the building for 21st century use. One of the very unique aspects of the project was the seismic strengthening that utilized innovative techniques, including ones that were used for the first time in California, which brought the building to current code without impacting any of the unique spaces or the exquisite ornament throughout the building.

About the Speaker:

Jonathan Pearlman is a photographer, historian, and the design principal of Elevation Architects, a 10-person firm with offices in San Francisco and Healdsburg in Sonoma County. With a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Architectural History from Tufts University and a Master of Architecture degree from University of Texas at Austin, Jonathan brings the two threads of design and preservation to his 23-year practice. He is in his second four-year term as a member of San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Commission and served on the City’s Landmark Preservation Advisory Board in the early 2000s.

Raised among classic Eames furniture with an avowed modernist interior designer mother, and then living for almost thirty years in San Francisco, Pearlman has come to understand that the answer to many design problems lies in the mining of architectural history to produce unique modern responses in decidedly historic contexts. He says, “as part of the talk, I will attempt to answer the question: how does a modern architect “do” preservation?”