Architecture, Agriculture & Planning

If you think of architecture as urban and agriculture as rural, you will have classified the two phyla of a Built Domain containing shelter, movement open space, and life support divisions. The Built Domain is habitat for a species that is capable of consuming its source of life with sprawl. Planning for a geographically limited Built Domain capable of protecting a growing population’s welfare, or quality of life, is the obvious solution; but it will require a new language and science of city design before architects and planners will be able to correlate the diversity of effort needed to lead us to symbiotic survival.

Agriculture is a victim of annexation for urban development within an expanding Built Domain. Agriculture will continue to be at risk until credible knowledge can defend rural land use allocation with revised legislation. Adequate agricultural allocation is imperative if you agree that growing populations must learn to live within a limited Built Domain that contains both urban and rural areas. In other words, urban areas for shelter will be constrained by rural areas for agriculture if they are contained within a geographically limited Built Domain.

I have focused on urban areas in the past and have failed to include line 3 in Table 1 as a consequence. It is a classification level of The Built Domain that precedes its four divisions, since these divisions are found in both rural and urban areas.

In this context, The Built Domain is not a project, district, city, region, or conurbation. It is the sum of all man-made creations, and a project, farm, or ranch is its cellular unit of growth. The allocation of land for its phyla, divisions, categories, and groups will determine our ability to shelter growing populations within a geographically limited Built Domain that protects our quality and source of life. “Quality” in this context includes an adequate food supply that has not been provided by The Natural Domain for quite some time. It can only be provided by adequate agricultural land use allocation within the Life Support Division of the Rural Phyla in The Built Domain.

In the case of the Rural Phyla, gross building area on a farm divided by total farm acres produces a shelter capacity measurement that is extremely low.

In the case of the Urban Phyla, gross building area divided by buildable project acres can be extremely high. In fact, it can be pushed to produce excessive intensity, intrusion, and dominance measurements that threaten the public welfare and quality of life. These measurements are one indication of the difference between rural and urban activity.

Gross building area divided by buildable project acres is shelter capacity. It is a function of design category choices, a category forecast model, design specification decisions within the model, and related master equation calculations. The design category master equation produces gross building area options that vary with the number of building floors under consideration.

Shelter capacity is occupied by activity and the gross building area introduced per acre determines the scope of activity that can be accommodated. The decisions that produce shelter capacity determine building mass and its impact on the surrounding population. Traditional architecture converts a building mass specification to the form, function, and appearance of its shelter capacity. Obviously, this impact is marginal in the Rural Phyla. It can be excessive in the Urban Phyla when measured in terms of capacity, intensity, intrusion, and dominance.

At the present time, we know more about the bushels of corn that can be produced per acre than the shelter capacity of an acre. We know even less about the intensity, intrusion, and dominance produced by shelter capacity options; and have not considered that the Built Domain is a second world on a single planet with rural and urban phyla that require shelter, movement, open space, and life support. I doubt that we have even considered the acres of The Natural Domain that must be preserved to protect our source of life.

Instinct, intuition, and anticipation are telling us that balance must be found between The Built and Natural Domains. The relationship between urban and rural land use allocation within a limited Built Domain is another puzzle we must solve.

I doubt that the shelter capacity of land in rural areas is considered when food production is the goal, and I doubt that food production is seriously considered in urban areas when shelter for activity is the goal. They are part of the same question, however. What is the geographic balance between the Built and Natural Domains that is required to protect a growing population’s source of life; and what is the relationship of land use allocation and urban form within The Built Domain that will protect a growing population’s quality of life? (Urban form is produced by a collection of individual land use allocation and shelter capacity decisions. They combine to produce spatial context, shelter composition, and shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and dominance within The Built Domain.)

Architectural design categories, forecast models, specification formats, and master equations are needed to predict shelter capacity options for land at the cellular level of allocation, conversion, and project formation within a limited Built Domain. When architects learn to use these tools they will be prepared to advance from the tactical to strategic level of shelter capacity evaluation.

Land use allocation and the composition of urban form within a limited Built Domain will reflect the progress we make toward a policy of symbiotic survival. This policy represents a design problem currently faced with an inadequate pattern language. The classification in Table 1 is a departure from this language to The Science of City Design.[1] It is a strategic language that can be used to lead an army, but this is simply a claim based on a vision at the present time. In the end, we will either adapt and survive or consume our source of life. Inability to adopt a climate change policy may hasten the process, but climate solutions will not contain a sprawling Built Domain served by movement, open space, and life support systems that threaten to consume our source of life.

---

[1] Hosack, Walter M., The Science of City Design: Architectural Algorithms for City Planning and Design Leadership, CreateSpace, 2016. (Available in paperback and e-book versions from Amazon.com)

Graduating from The Floor Area Ratio

The floor area ratio FAR is a zoning regulation originally created to protect public health, safety, and welfare from excessive construction in urban areas. It is a project measurement equal to gross building area divided by gross land area in square feet. A floor area ratio of 5, for instance, means that 5 acres of gross building area may be constructed on one acre of gross land area. The simplicity of the regulation is attractive, but its simplicity inadequately leads the decisions that combine to determine shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and dominance within projects, neighborhoods, districts, cities, and regions.  

CORRELATION

I’ll make my point with Table 1. It is a forecast model constructed to predict shelter capacity in square feet of gross building area per buildable acre of land when no parking is required. There are eight boxes in the Land Module and five boxes in the NPL Module. The values entered in these boxes may be modified at will and represent design specification decisions. These decisions are correlated to find the maximum core area available for a building floor plan in cell G32 using the architectural algorithm in cells H3-H33. The core area found in cell G32 is used by the master equation in cell A35 to predict gross building area options in cells B40-B49. These options are based on the floor quantity alternatives entered in cells A40-A49.

The shelter capacity options related to the gross building area predictions in Col. B of the Planning Forecast Panel are calculated in cells D40-D49 using the equation in cell D39. Shelter capacity is expressed in building sq. ft. per acre.

Massing ratios related to the gross building area options in Col. B of the Planning Forecast Panel are calculated in Col. E. These ratios are used by the equation in cell F39 to calculate the intensity represented by each gross building area option in Col. B of the Planning Forecast Panel.

Related intrusion measurements are calculated in Col. G. They are used to calculate dominance options in Col. J of the Planning Forecast Panel using the equation in cell H39.

Finally, the floor area ratio representing each gross building area option in Col. B of the Planning Forecast Panel is calculated in Col. J using the equation in cell J39.

The point is that the floor area ratios calculated in Col. J of the Planning Forecast Panel react to the specification decisions entered in the 23 boxes of the NPL forecast model. The floor area ratio does not lead them, and our emphasis on the ratio as a leadership tool has produced confusion, argument, conflict, and the application of legal opinion based on the precedent of mistaken assumptions. I’ll make my point with one issue.

In my opinion, the most significant topic omitted from floor area regulation is the provision of social open space for people at street level. The opposing argument has contended that social open space is a public benefit that should be purchased at public expense. The open space specification in cell F11 of Table 1 is zero percent in cell F11 to begin an evaluation of these two positions. The value represents a developer’s attempt to maximize leasable building area on a given, high-cost urban land area. If the floor area ratio limit for Table 1 is 19, the design specification predicts that a 20 story building will produce 823,776 sq. ft. of gross building area and a floor area ratio of 18.91. I could have adjusted the specification values to make the floor area ratio exactly 19 in cell J47, but left it so I could point out that predictions will change whenever one or more specification values are modified in Table 1.

Table 2 has revised the zero percent value in cell F11 of Table 1 to 32.18%. All other specification values from Table 1 are held constant in Table 2. The 32.18 percentage has been entered to make the floor area ratio in cell J49 of Table 2 identical to that in cell J47 of Table 1. A comparison shows that the same floor area ratio and gross building area can be achieved when 32.18% of open space is provided for pedestrian relief at street level, but the trade-off is an increase from 20 stories in Table 1 to 30 stories in Table 2. The additional stories represent additional cost to reach an equal gross building area. In the past an increase in height was considered a bonus in return for social open space at the pedestrian level, but the calculations in Table 2 show that ten additional floors produce gross building area parity.

It could be argued that a bonus would involve negotiations for building height in excess of ten stories to compensate for the cost of increased building height. It could just as easily be argued that the floor area ratio of 16 was a reasonable limit; that social open space has been ignored as an essential part of the effort to protect public health, safety, and welfare within urban pattern and form; and that the deficiency should not be allowed to continue. I do not intend to resolve the argument. I only wish to point that it can be debated on a more credible foundation of measurement, evaluation, prediction, and knowledge. Cooperation between public and private interest will not be secured until all parties can sit around a table discussing options with a common language that can accurately predict implications.

GROSS BLDG AREA

In most cases a developer will know the land area involved, but in some cases he or she will be exploring the buildable land area needed to serve a given gross building area objective when a floor area ratio is given. Table 3 has been constructed to answer this question. If a floor area ratio of 16, a gross building area objective of 850,000 sq. ft. and a 30% social open space objective are given in addition to the other specification values noted, the master equation in cell A36 and the secondary equations in row 40 of the Planning Forecast Panel predict that 1.212 buildable acres will produce a floor area ratio of 16.10 in cell K49 when a 25 story building is chosen in cell A49. A slight modification to the specification values entered in the NPB Module of Table 3 could reduce 16.10 to a precise floor area ratio value of 16 in cell K49. The entire specification would represent a public/private agreement.

Table 4 shows that when no open space is provided in cell F10, the same gross building objective and floor area ratio can be reached on the same land area with only 17.5 building floors. The floors needed to compensate for the 30% public open space dedication in Table 3 would be a subject for negotiation as mentioned previously.

CONCLUSION

When social open space was introduced in Tables 2 and 3, the intensity and dominance calculations in columns F and H of the Planning Forecast Panel dropped from those calculated in Tables 1 and 4. There is no research that defines acceptable levels of intensity and dominance, but the ability to measure these conditions brings us closer to the knowledge needed to protect public welfare and improve quality of life within urban areas.

At the present time, most cities are woven together with ribbons of sidewalk and torrents of traffic. In the most extreme cases, these rivers flow between canyons of artificial stone and glass governed by skyplane regulations that attempt to ensure light, air, and ventilation penetrate to street level. In other cases, the sidewalk is omitted and replaced by a parking lot that qualifies as a front yard. In both cases, it has been our method of protecting the public health, safety, and welfare with minimum standards that are now coming into question. Why is the public being protected with government standards meant to keep them alive with a minimum quality of life (welfare)? The measurements of shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and dominance in Tables 1-3 represent a method of calibrating “welfare” so that research can begin to produce the knowledge needed to define minimum standards for livable cities.

The physical intensity, intrusion, and dominance of shelter, movement and life support within cities is offset by social open space. The result is referred to as urban form composition. We have yet to write the first score in this composition with a language that can lead the orchestra. The result has been discordant practice as virtuosos independently tune their instruments.

The first step is to recognize that a language is needed. The second is to recognize that cities must be woven together with social open space before they can begin to protect a population’s physical, social, psychological, environmental, and economic welfare.

Tables 1-3 were included to illustrate how open space negotiations can begin when assumptions are replaced with accurate measurement and calculation. The debate concerns the need for this open space to protect the public welfare, and the public/private share of this expense. These are political questions that require additional knowledge, and I do believe that answers are needed. The Science of City Design[1] has been written to encourage you to explore these questions with a credible language. It can lead us to a geographically limited Built Domain capable of protecting our quality and source of life -- the Natural Domain.

---

[1] Hosack, Walter M., The Science of City Design: Architectural Algorithms for City Planning and Design Leadership, CreateSpace, 2016. (Available in paperback and e-book versions from Amazon.com)