Walter M Hosack

Symbiotic Architecture Walter M Hosack

These essays have been stepping stones on my path to the completion of my fourth book, The Equations of Urban Design, and have appeared on my blog www.wmhosack.blogspot.com and at various other receptive sites such as Linked-In and Facebook. The first book and its second edition, Land Development Calculations, were published by McGraw-Hill in 2001 and 2010. The third book, The Science of City Design, was self-published in 2016. My last book, mentioned above, has been self-published in 2020. All four are available from Amazon.com. It took me three books to arrive at the final building design classification system, architectural algorithms, and master equations that make the prediction of shelter capacity for any given land area mathematically predictable and scientifically consistent in my fourth. (Shelter capacity is gross building area in sq. ft. divided by the acres of buildable land occupied.) This is significant for two reasons: (1) Every acre we consume to expand the shelter, movement, open space, and life support divisions of the Built Domain is an acre we remove from our source of life; and (2) The scope of activity on every acre we consume must produce an average yield per acre equal to a city's average expense per acre to repel decline. The percentage of each activity sheltered within a city determines its economic potential to support a desired quality of life, but excessive building mass, pavement and movement can compromise the pedestrian spaces remaining with oppressive intensity. Economically stable proportions of shelter activity can now be measured and predicted at the cellular level of the urban anatomy. This means we can write our own DNA for the sustainable urban aggregations we must form with the equations of urban design. The essays in this book have been left along the path I have traveled. I hope they stimulate the work we need to undertake.