Design bad architecture but make it look good

Design Review Board: Make it look like the image on the left, but take cues and details from the image on the right. // left image of Santa Barbara by Photopippo // right image of the neighboring building to the north of the site by Google Maps (location redacted)

We are working on a project in the South Bay where we received a planning response letter for our designs of townhouses.

Right off the bat, we knew the Design Review Board would not take kindly to contemporary architecture, which has been increasingly what people want in houses, so we designed traditional Spanish style houses, a type that they have been receptive to in the past. So we've already crippled ourselves because if we don't appease the royal and completely arbitrary demands of the DRB, it makes the process much more difficult and possibly results in no project at all.

This response letter from the city was one of the most incoherent letters I've ever had to deal with. When I asked some of my fellow consultants, they responded in kind, that the letter was extremely confusing. Old comments were left on there from previous response letters, some with new comments dated and appended, others not. Some were formatted like current comments, but clearly had nothing to do with the newest design. It was difficult to tell what exactly was a current comment or not. To add insult to injury, much of the comments were directed to make the plans more clear, despite them already being clear enough to be legible by anyone that has seen a plan before.

In one of the more bizarre comments I've seen was its appeal to design the buildings to match the "rustic" feel of the neighborhood. The planner clearly has never seen the surrounding architecture (of which there were pictures in our plan set), has and is blatantly lying to "justify" a more traditional style of architecture, or she somehow thinks these buildings are "rustic":

Top left: The existing building on the site in question. Does the DRB really want to jeopardize the project with their inane demands and leave that complex there? Really?
Top right: The building across the street to the west - 1970s-1980s generic architecture.
Bottom left: The building across the street on the south side - generic cheap mid-century architecture.
Bottom right: The only building that looks decent around us, a block away. Modern architecture. The DRB has allowed more leeway for modern architecture for podiums, which is this building type.
Where the rustic architecture at, yo???
// all photos from Google Maps

It doesn't take a PhD in architecture history to see that the surrounding architecture was largely built in the mid-century with the budget as the driving factor. One building is a bit more of an 80s modern style. They more resembled crappy Motel 6 architecture than anything to emulate or draw inspiration from. 

If we designed anything like that, we would be laughed out of our clients' conference room, excoriated at design review, and I would hang up my architect's scale and call it quits. So what are we do to? The only thing we can do to get through these inane jurisdictions: Bullshit our way through it.

The planning principal at our firm talked about the roughly similar color palettes, which was about all that was similar to the surrounding, and even then, mostly due to staff direction (talk about some ugly colors that don't fit in with the new architecture at all). During a video conference, the planner reiterated the need to follow the context of the site, to which we just kind of nodded while we shook our heads, embarrassed for the planner. After, a few consultants and coworkers joked that maybe she meant to type the word "rusty" instead of "rustic".

Not only this, but the city's own rowhouse design guidelines would not allow us to design anything that is even close to resembling the massing and character of the surrounding neighborhood. The guidelines require individual unit breaks, so it reads vertically instead of one long building. All the surrounding architecture consists of large single buildings. We know from experience that the city's design review will require varying materials with high degrees of ornamentation. The surrounding architecture has very little varying materials and pretty much no ornamentation. The design review board, from our past experience, will reject modern architecture. The surrounding architecture is mid-century tract building modern. 

The city's design review will deny that it mandates design styles because that really is not the intended role of a Design Review Board, but any elementary look into what they do illustrates the opposite. Sure, they don't say outright what they want to see, but they give particular direction that goes against what you try to do. For example, they'll say add more architectural elements and ornamentation which is code for saying "no modern", given its diametric opposition to ornamentation. As Adolf Loos mentioned in his lecture Ornament and Crime, he likened ornamentation on buildings to tattoos. To put this in perspective, he thought anyone with a tattoo was either in jail, will soon be in jail, or a "degenerate aristocrat". Well, this was 1910. But clearly, one of the fathers of modernist architecture thought poorly of ornamentation. So when an unelected city official mandates the addition of ornamentation, that is an explicit stylistic demand.

As a result, the city's demands are completely subjective and results in the architect being placed in a situation where the direction is mandated by the city, but one has to just guess and designing to take a stab at what they really want instead of actually practicing sound architecture. 

We could have created some great townhomes with updated contemporary architecture to not only respond to the context but greatly improve upon the fabric of the neighborhood. As more of the neighborhood transforms, it would set a precedence for the technology hub that the city has become known for. Instead, we have regressive, backward-looking architecture that is confused about its place in the world, its DNA birthed in arbitrary design guidelines and design review whims than any sound architectural theory.

Since the response letter they provided was so vague and confusing, we scheduled a conference call with the planner to get some direction. As I suspected, she was completely useless, giving us zero further clarity, deferring instead to the same arbitrary platitudes stated. She did offer to circle with the head of the DRB to get more concrete comments, which we took her up on. She asked for 3D renderings and reformatting the set to a before and after on the same page, since apparently, they don't have the requisite amount of energy to open up the submitted file they already have on their computers. While we were able to promise a one-day turnaround to generate new 3D models and graphics set, the planner needed a week to provide comments. So it takes them five times longer to just think about and say something about the design than it takes us to actually create the design? What an apt analogy to illustrate the efficiencies of the private sector versus the public sector.