© 2007 Francis Loetterle. All Rights Reserved. EFFICIENCY "Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste or unnecessary effort. Exhibiting a high ratio of output to input." SUSTAINABILITY "To keep in existence: to maintain. To provide with nourishment or sustenance." Our food chain and our lives depend upon maintaining habitat and bio-diversity above all else. Water and food are the key to all life including sustainable human settlements. Human settlements should grow their own food and control their own watershed, no food, no water, and no settlement. As long as some people have food and water and some do not there will never be any true long-term political and economic sustainability. For as long as we continue rampant pollution and waste and disregard comprehensive recycling there will never be any true long-term ecological sustainability. SMALL "Little in quantity, amount, value, duration, extent, etc. Humble, modest; as, a small beginning." There is no more powerful way to implement the principles of spiritual rationalism and achieve a measure of global efficiency and sustainability than to build things smaller: smaller furniture and appliances, smaller cars and garages, smaller houses and buildings, smaller lots and smaller projects. DENSITY "To make more dense. To increase the number of inhabitants per unit geographic region. To increase complexity of structure or content." Our new settlements must be dense, 7,000 people per square kilometer or 18,000 people per square mile, like turn of the century american suburbs, if we are ever to set aside enough land for habitat, watershed and floodplain, farming and forest. We should set aside the land for the planet before we build houses. We should make existing settlements denser instead of letting them sprawl for mile after mile and year after year. Existing cities should be made denser by means of urban infill and redevelopment. Density of land use over time is optimized by mixed use and multiple use and by day and night use. Density in conjunction with mixed use, multiple use, and day and night land use results in fewer trips, shorter trips, less automobile dependence and much better infrastructure optimization. ECONOMY "Thrifty use of materials and resources. Efficient and sparing use of means." Economy does not mean cheap, and it refers to much more than spending less money. Efficient and sparing use of means should be understood to refer to labor, material, energy, land and time, as well as capital. MODULARITY "Construction with standardized units or dimensions for flexibility and variety in use." Modular planning and design should result in increased pre-fabrication and mass production efficiency and timesaving. Efficient prefabrication and mass production should result in purchasing and inventory efficiencies; better control of quality, schedule and budget; better design-build coordination and more efficient use of labor, material and energy. CONSERVATION "Controlled use and systematic protection of natural resources." PRESERVATION "To keep safe as from injury or peril. To maintain unchanged. To keep or maintain intact." Excerpted from Efficiency & Sustainability," an essay in Mass Housing Design Principles and Prototypes. Mass Housing Design Principles And Prototypes, by Francis Loetterle, 118 pages, 55 drawings, $45.00. Click here to order This book addresses the design of efficient and sustainable mass housing. The principles and prototypes presented are the products of twenty-eight years research and practice. The design principles address: Efficiency and Sustainability, Open Architecture and Modular Design, Rational Building Systems, Cost and Affordability, and Speed. The prototypes are comprised of unbuilt projects and hypothetical exercises. Modular planning prototypes for mass housing are presented in addition to single and multifamily modular design prototypes. All of the mass housing prototypes employ light gauge steel construction, modular design, prefabrication and mass-production. Each prototype addresses an obvious and pressing housing problem that has not received much current recognition or tangible solution. Some examples of pressing problems addressed are urban infill and small scale redevelopment housing, low income senior citizen housing, working poor housing, especially in developing countries, war refugee and war recovery housing and disaster relief-recovery housing. The contents of this book should be of interest to all people, worldwide, involved in mass housing; primarily planners, architects, engineers, students and teachers, but also housing and urban development agencies, disaster relief agencies, international development banks, redevelopment agencies, zoning code agencies, low cost housing mortgage lenders, production home builders and residential construction component manufacturers. Efficient and sustainable mass housing is a worldwide problem both critical and current. These mass housing principles and prototypes are presented in conjunction with the equally pressing and much larger problem of efficient and sustainable new neighborhoods, communities, towns and cities. The book is not a critique of what is but a series of suggestions concerning what to do instead. 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