[eldavido]

I've deliberately left some details of this off to protect the name of the firm and individuals involved.

There's a particular office, part of the SF city government, that's responsible for interpreting a fast-moving, complex body of code. As you can imagine, municipal building regulations can change pretty quickly (much more quickly than state and national regs) and somehow, the regulatory climate was such that the city refused to permit the design. More worryingly, the process was basically a from-scratch review where each time they asked the regulator to review the plans, they did a ground-up inspection of the entire drawing, and interpreted the regulations differently each time. Absent getting a court order, they're stuck fighting the SF office and trying to get them to issue the permit, or get some kind of variance/exemption that will allow their design.

My girlfriend often laughs because she got into architecture to design buildings, but after all this, she sometimes jokes that she's basically a low-end lawyer who also has to yell at contractors and only very occasionally, open up CAD. Sort of funny.

[tomsaffell]

Yes, having pulled a permit myself I can attest that it's 10% drawing, 90% badgering and debating the exact meaning of the code, in all its glorious ambiguity.