The (Other) Problem with Design Review

Every city should be a unique place that is identifiable simply by the built environment. One of the biggest challenges to that goal is that new buildings are designed so that they can fit in anywhere. Too often, developers and architects aren’t proposing context specific designs for new buildings. Once solution to this challenge has been for cities to impose design review requirements on proposed developments.

Unfortunately, design review has a well-known problem of making projects take longer, be more expensive, and increase the risk of denial, which all serve as constraints on development. However, there is another, less discussed problem when communities subject projects to a design review process. Design review makes new developments boring, like everything else, and robs them of any voice or point of view.

Design review is literally design-by-committee. The process requires that any project is designed so that it is innocuous and inoffensive enough that nobody objects to it. This leads to a least common denominator of designs, and it ensures that every place looks exactly like every other place. Design review often makes it so that a place cannot develop its own sense of identity, because every new development could be place in any community anywhere in the country.

Of course, design review is not the only force driving the architectural monoculture we see today. The requirements of the International Building Code, the desires of national credit tenants, and the use of common cheap building materials all drive buildings to have similar looks today. However, architectural design review continues to beat out any distinctive features from new developments that are proposed within all of the other existing constraints on design.

The popular replacement to design review committees that fits within current California law is to include objective design standards that prevent the construction of plain beige boxes. These standards often include requirements to break up building massing with plane breaks and roof projections, to provide additional articulation on walls facing the public right of way, and the addition of other architectural details that are often akin to putting lipstick on a pig. This leads to an architectural style that R. John Anderson has dubbed Ransom Note Style.

However, this too does not help achieve a community’s goal of becoming a nice place to live that is unique to itself. Instead, we get buildings that can still be built anywhere, that now just cost more to build and have more fenestration.

To create places that are unique and livable, cities need to rethink the role of design review and objective design standards. The biggest driver of livability and character is the public realm and the area where private uses meet public at the human scale. Objective design standards have value where people on the street interact with the buildings, but beyond that create a larger constraint than benefit for new buildings. In other words, the design standards should be confined to the ground floor and be simple enough to allow for the building designer and tenants to express their own personality through the design and use of the building.

In the end, the way a place gains character is through developers and residents expressing their own unique style through the design and use of our shared built environment. This cannot be accomplished through design-by-committee or overly prescriptive design standards, objective or not.