This conceptual design project speculates on the future of San Francisco’s iconic architectural heritage, challenging the rigid preservation policies that govern the city's historic housing stock. During the 1960s through the 1980s, San Francisco’s Victorian homes were widely out of fashion, providing affordable, communal spaces for counter-culture youth and serving as domestic symbols of social transformation. Today, those same houses have become tightly regulated cornerstones of municipal preservation codes.

This project explores the tension between historic preservation and architectural evolution, asking a critical question for modern design: what exactly are we preserving—the living culture of a home, or merely a static aesthetic? 

To ruminate on this question, our Queen Anne House design begins with an investigative "average plan" synthesized directly from local planning guidelines.

By cutting, pasting, and layering code diagrams for bay windows, corner turrets, dormers, and setbacks from various San Francisco neighborhoods, the project establishes a regulatory baseline floor plan. While the underlying layout represents a literal mathematical average of the city's building constraints, the resulting facades are pushed to the absolute legal limit.

The exterior features intentionally exaggerated, hyper-expressive interpretations of beloved local motifs—including deep-set bay windows, soaring corner turrets, textured shingles, and sharp gabled roofs. The result is a thought-provoking exercise that breathes new, avant-garde life into the Victorian typology, operating entirely within the boundary lines of the preservation code.