Features

Members of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) and the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) will hold a joint meeting Wednesday night on the future of historic preservation in the city center. 

Following the session, DAPAC members will conduct their own meeting to offer comments on UC Berkeley’s massive building campaign at and near Memorial Stadium. 

The commission will meet again the following evening, this time to handle more routine items. 

Both meetings begin at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

Wednesday night, following an introduction by LPC Chair Robert Johnson and DAPAC Chair Will Travis, the panels will hear from a series of speakers, starting with Austene Hall of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. 

Two speakers from Architectural Resources Group, a San Francisco firm specializing in projects involving historical resources, will speak on economic development and preservation and the assessment of historic resources in the downtown area. 

That firm has been hired by the city to conduct a survey of historical buildings and other resources in the expanded downtown planning area. 

Donlyn Lyndon, a UC Berkeley architecture professor and editor of PLACES magazine, will speak on contextual design. 

Following a joint discussion by members of the two city panels, the LPC will adjourn and DAPAC members will provide their comments on the draft Environmental Impact Report on the university’s southeast quadrant projects as they may impact the downtown. 

Besides a massive retrofit and remodel of the stadium, the university is planning a major athletic training center abutting the stadium, an underground parking lot and a new office and meeting facility to unite functions of its law and business schools. 

Thursday meeting 

Commissioners will face a full agenda Thursday night, including landmarking proposals for two threatened buildings at UC and Berkeley’s equally threatened Iceland. 

The campus structures are Memorial Stadium—which is the subject of a planned major renovation that would gut the interior and add an above-the-rim structure with luxury skyboxes and press rooms—and the Bevatron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Among the other items on the agenda is a hearing on the draft environmental impact report for the proposed block-square, five-story condominium-over-commercial complex planned for 700 University Ave.