Local architects love to complain about San Francisco’s Planning Department, how the latter supposedly thwarts the formers’ efforts to add dynamic new buildings to the landscape.

Now one of the city’s best designers has chimed in — not over that second glass of wine, when such comments often take flight, but in a $65 architectural monograph.

“Far too much of our effort goes into explaining what we are doing,” Stanley Saitowitz tells author Michael Webb in “Building Community: New Apartment Architecture,” published this spring by Thames & Hudson. “The bureaucracy is obstructive, and committee-type negotiations tend to make the buildings worse, not better.”

Saitowitz is no self-absorbed hack who looks in the mirror and sees Frank Lloyd Wright. Quite the opposite. He’s the rare architect whose work wins wide acclaim, yet embraces the challenge of creating distinctive urban housing at all scales — from a pop-up grid of student apartments in Berkeley to the ice-blue chic of 8 Octavia, the Hayes Valley condominium complex featured in Webb’s book.

His buildings share a distilled rigor, at once forceful and precise. “No other architect has so successfully abstracted the DNA of San Francisco,” argues Webb in a book that also celebrates projects by such architectural stars as Frank Gehry, Jeanne Gang and David Adjaye. But it’s an uphill battle, Saitowitz suggests.

“Dealing with the city Planning Department, which doesn’t understand architecture, is a very slow process,” Saitowitz says in the book. “We have a lot of trouble with the preservationist spirit in that department, now that almost every district of San Francisco is considered historic and every new building has to comply with its character. We firmly believe in respecting scale; Planning wants textbook replicas.”

Last week, Saitowitz told me Webb took few notes on the day they met while Webb was researching his book. Not every word might be correct, but Saitowitz stands by the sentiments.

“If we were looking around San Francisco and seeing all these wonderful buildings that result from the process, then I wouldn’t complain,” Saitowitz told me. “But we don’t.”

No surprise, the city’s top planner sees things differently.

“Most of Stanley’s buildings have been built pretty much as he proposed them to staff. To say otherwise is ridiculous,” said John Rahaim, planning director since 2008. “And we’re not asking for ‘textbook replicas.’ Our guidelines make it clear we want architecture of our time.”

But to Rahaim and his staff, buildings need to be good neighbors, whatever the style — even if striking that subjective balance requires the methodical scrutiny that might cause some architects to bridle. He also made this valid point: The same guidelines that slow things down “keep the egregious stuff from happening.” In other words, they’re intended to raise the bar.

Realistically, the debate will never be resolved. Architects don’t like being put through a grind of second-guessing on details like the width of a bay. Planners get tired of architects who view anyone who disagrees with them as design illiterates.

And this being San Francisco, everyone else will have an opinion about what finally does get built.