SHELTER SPRAWL

Sprawl is a disease consuming the Natural Domain with building mass, pavement, and open space in both the Urban and Rural Phyla of the Built Domain. When sprawl is seen as a cancer expanding with population growth, there will be a search for a cure to treat this threat to our source and quality of life. The cure will begin at the cellular level of sprawl formation called a lot. A primary building providing shelter for human activity is its nucleus. A cell and its aggregation is where architecture can help by focusing on the building categories, cell content, design specification values, and master equations that produce gross building area options within each cell of currently sprawling urban form.


Gross building area can be occupied by any activity. These area and activity options combine with pavement and social open space to produce levels of shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and domination in each cell of the Shelter Division of the Urban and Rural Phyla of the Built Domain; but capacity and intensity have not been measured or compared with occupant activity. This combination has municipal revenue and expense per acre implications that affect its physical, social, psychological, environmental, and economic quality of life; but this lack of correlation means that the relationship of building mass, intensity, and activity to economic stability and quality of life cannot be predicted at the present time. This, however, is the key to a cure for sprawl vainly seeking financial stability and shelter for growing populations.


Shelter capacity is gross building area per acre. It produces a level of intensity, intrusion, and domination in a cell based on the building design category chosen and the values entered in its design specification template. These values have had partial recognition and conflicting specifications in zoning ordinances. This has led to uncorrelated, unsuccessful attempts to consistently lead the emergence of urban form to physical, social, and economic success that protects our health, safety, welfare, and source of life.


Architecture intuitively understands the correlation required but has never classified building design categories, comprehensively listed their design specification topics, or written algorithms to correlate design specification values for use by master equations that accurately predict shelter capacity and intensity options for any given land area. This leadership language was not needed by anyone when the planet was “a world without end” and we were encouraged to be “fruitful and multiply”. These exhortations have led to promiscuous consumption of land vainly searching for economic stability with hopeful annexation. Public participation has kept everyone busy within the city, but its focus on detail has failed to recognize sprawl and the knowledge needed for correction. 


The cure is city design of urban form for growing populations that contains shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and dominance decisions balanced for economic stability and quality of life within sustainable limits. New relational databases are needed to produce knowledge that can defend the decisions required. Decisions in turn must be expressed in a language that can lead. It must correlate the mathematical design specification decisions that are the hidden foundation of shelter formation. This is the language needed to repeat success and avoid failure on a very finite world in a universe without end.


A city design recipe for urban form is not a replacement for traditional architectural priorities. It is a massing prelude that requires further architectural refinement to produce shelter composition, context, and appearance. These results will symbolize the logical foundation needed to achieve sustainable cities and symbiotic survival on a planet that does not compromise with ignorance. 



If you have read my books you should have a thorough understanding of what I mean by the mathematical language of city design, building design categories, design specifications, gross building area, shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, dominance and urban form correlation. The first two contained forecast models based on the incremental approach to calculation historically used by architects. The third translated this approach into architectural algorithms that correlated comprehensive sets of design specification values to serve a building design category master equation. The equation predicted gross building area options based on these design specification decisions and floor quantity alternatives. A change to any specification value or floor quantity alternative produced a new set of options, but a forecasting CD was not included because of previous copyright infringement. This book has been replaced by an unpublished fourth that simplifies the third and contains far better organization. All final forecast models will be placed in the cloud if someone takes up the baton.

A Collision of Architectural Opinion

The first two paragraphs are excerpts from comments that have prompted my response.


Mark Wigley: “…If you could say what the problem is you wouldn’t hire an architect…You call an architect in when you have a very complex situation in which you have a lot of information that doesn’t really connect, and the architect just goes in there and sees or projects or imagines a possible form of organization that allows that complexity to continue…naiveté is crucial…because to know that you don’t know, to have a sense that you don’t know and therefore to be in awe of what you are experiencing and full of love and respect for complexity, this I think is the genius of architects and why I think they have an enormously important role in society.”

Ujjval Vyas, Ph.D., J.D. Strategic Advisor | Attorney | Entrepreneur | Scholar | Principal of Alberti Group | Founder, FDI-AEC

“Are you kidding me? This is the clarion call of obfuscatory mumbo jumbo. The endless excuse-making about a serious lack of thinking, deep respect for learning and knowledge, and the final recourse of the scammer. The idea that ignorance is a qualification … is bizarre... No wonder the idea that architects have some special design thinking to contribute is only of interest to those trying to bail water out of this Titannic (sp). Architecture is too great a discipline to be permanently held down, but the jury is still out if this recovery is just over the horizon or only where there be dragon’s (sp).

Walter Hosack:


Architecture records complex owner requirements and desires in a document it calls a program. It solves the puzzle defined by the program with logic it calls schematic design. In the military the program would be called a policy and schematic design would be called strategic planning. Architecture has made the mistake of calling its entire effort fine art.


Mr. Vyas talks about seeing over the horizon to reach a remote destination, but the skill required an abstract ability to calculate latitude and longitude. Unfortunately, architecture earns a living from its project orientation and has no incentive to consider a horizon beyond the cell it calls a lot, or the cells that are combined to form a larger project area. It will take a different form of calculation to pursue an attempt to cure metastasizing sprawl that is consuming our source of life.


A building is the shelter nucleus of a cell we call a lot. Cells collect to create a Built Domain that is expanding through annexation of the Natural Domain. The form created is called sprawl to shelter the activities of growing populations, and there is no correlated mathematical language or political priority that can lead to healthy, symbiotic urban form within geographic limits.


Zoning is a collection of uncorrelated, conflicting design specifications that cannot predict the shelter capacity of cells and their aggregations. As a result, it cannot lead to the formation of healthy urban anatomies that avoid excessive intensity with correlated shelter capacity and economic activity. At the present time, zoning contradictions combine with activity misallocation to abet sprawl searching in vain for elusive economic stability through annexation. 


Land use planning is a two dimensional exercise that cannot correlate the shelter capacity, intensity, and activity of urban form. This is critical because shelter capacity measures the gross building area per acre present or planned. Shelter is occupied by activity and the combination determines revenue yield per acre of land area consumed. When thought of collectively, average economic yield per acre consumed must equal a city’s average expense per acre to avoid budget cuts and a declining quality of life.


Since shelter capacity can be occupied by any activity, the ability to predict shelter capacity per acre and the economic yield per square foot from occupant activity is crucial to economic stability. At the present time, a city cannot balance the shelter capacity of its land with occupant activity to meet the average yield per acre it needs for operations, maintenance, improvement, and debt service.

This is a problem that begins with architectural inability to comprehensively and accurately predict and compare shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and dominance options at the cellular level of urban aggregation, but it is not a problem that can be assigned to architecture as we know it. It is a problem for city design leadership with a new version of latitude and longitude prediction.

The goal is shelter capacity, intensity, and activity in proportions that will protect a growing population’s economic stability and quality of life within geographic limits that protect their source of life. This is our new destination over the horizon. It will require the ability to calculate another version of latitude and longitude and the power of a captain sailing in a universe without end.

Pete Pointer

Science is good but principles, values applied in process locally is more important.

Like "Pete" Pointer FAICP, ALA, ITE’S comment

Walter Hosack

A strategic plan to correlate shelter capacity, intensity, and activity for economic stability throughout a city begins at the cellular level of building mass, pavement, and open space. Conversion of this cellular recipe to composition, context, and appearance is a more detailed, tactical level of physical design that you refer to as "local". I would not prioritize the effort. It is all needed to contribute to our quality of life within sustainable cities that are capable of contributing to our symbiotic survival.

Drake Waters

The world needs good architecture more than ever by a factor of 100. So much is changing and has to change and the brilliance and creativity good architecture brings is priceless. Good architecture is not wasteful useless and comatose through aesthetics alone. It is a way of thinking that encompasses everything to support society. We are done for if current trends in architecture continue. We must enable AI to force multiply our impact and integration of disciplines has to be the norm. None of that is possible in gate keeper lock down, our status quo. Sink or swim? We are sinking fast.