one way to reduce man’s ecological footprint.

Yet the discipline of urban planning, in the US at least, is dominated by traditionalism. There is widespread rejection of ‘modernism’ – the idea that needs and requirements can be analysed and become the basis for new, radical solutions. Experimentation is disdained, and the goal of urban planners is to recreate the cities of the pre-war, pre-automobile era. According to this view, the grid, like the wheel, is an invention that cannot be improved upon. Whilst technology has been applied to buildings and infrastructure, the core discipline of the planning design process - the manipulation of shapes and patterns on paper – has seen little scientific innovation.

Claims
I’m presenting here a new method of subdividing land and planning neighbourhoods and towns. I posit that it produces better social, environmental and aesthetic outcomes, but in a way that uses land more efficiently thus reducing land and infrastructure costs for new development. This method is based on the concept of tessellation.

Tessellation
In geometry, to tessellate means to cover a plane with a pattern without having any gap or overlap. For centuries artists and craftsmen have used tessellation as a tool to create visual effects on surfaces. Tiling is the most common form of tessellation, and in its simplest form the tiles are regular polygons. Muslim craftsmen in Spain in the 15th century created beautifully complex visual effects by tessellating a small basic tile pattern. Intricate and complex designs can be built up from basic tile patterns in a simple way by this process (fig 1.1).

In tessellation planning this creative power is applied to town planning, where the colours are not merely decorative but represent functional space. Sub-dividing land according to ownership and use was perhaps the first use of geometry, so the application of tessellation to town-planning is quite apt.

Terrace houses to cul-de-sacs
First we look at terrace houses, the most common house type in my country, and the alternative produced by tessellation planning which is based on the cul-de-sac form.

Despite what New Urbanists say, people still like to live in cul-de-sacs. According to one study, between the ‘grid’, ‘loops’ and cul-de-sacs, the latter were the most popular. In Malaysia, a developing country with per capita income a quarter of that in the US, only the rich can afford to live in a single-family house located in a cul-de-sac. How can the cul-de-sac be made affordable for more people?

First, we improve the cul-de-sac by making it bigger to be able to fit in a public green area in the middle because local planning regulations require 10% of any residential development to be open space (fig 2). Then we create an interlocking arrangement of cul-de-sacs such that each building lot would face at least two cul-de-sacs. If the buildings in this layout were detached houses, they would be in the top range of the market. But instead, we sub-divide the buildings into 2, 3, 4 or 6, to create duplex, triplex, quadruplex or sextuplex units.

As we divide the buildings, the land area and the built-up area become smaller; the number of units in the layout and the density of the development go up to rival that of terrace houses. In this way, the housing units become less expensive. Yet every building still retains a public access. Furthermore, the quality of the external environment is not compromised – only that more units share it!

The layout produced is a tessellation pattern produced from a basic tile design comprising houses, private gardens and driveways, the public footpath and road, and even a portion of a small park. This triangle is tessellated to form a group of houses around a courtyard, then to three courtyards that form a courtyard, then to a hexagonal block of houses, and can be further tessellated to form neighbourhoods and towns.

The house types and urban patterns created by tessellation planning are not only new, but also offer better solutions to the problems of urbanization compared to existing house types and street patterns.

Neighbourhood Concept
Tessellation housing adopts a hierarchical concept of neighbourhood. A family may belong simultaneously to a ‘courtyard neighbourhood’ (of say, 16 houses), a ‘cul-de-sac neighbourhood’ (of say, 42 homes), a ‘block neighbourhood’ (of about 250 houses), and a ‘town community’ of around 1500 houses. The latter is what corresponds most closely to the idea of the ‘neighbourhood unit’. However I would argue that it is the quality of the smallest cluster of houses – that found in the ‘courtyard neighbourhood’ – that is most important in creating a sense of community.

Social contact and spontaneous interaction are important building blocks towards creating a sense of community. The creation of a safe, pleasant and shady area of suitable size, just outside the home, is a basic feature of Tessellation housing (fig 3). The central courtyard becomes the social focus of the neighbourhood. In this location it is accessible to all to enjoy, the very young, the old and the disabled.

The Economic aspect
Several factors combine in Tessellation planning to produce greatly increased land use efficiencies (fig 4.1-4.4). These advantages are summarized in the mathematical table comparing the most efficient terrace housing (terrace houses with 18’ or 5.4m frontages) against the most efficient Honeycomb Housing (sextuplex blocks).

It was possible to prove mathematically that substantially less road area is required, which improves both the green area and housing density. Further studies have shown that this can result in a reduction in the cost of constructing the infrastructure.The new method was conceived as a practical and economical substitute to the terrace house, but it can also be seen to be an alternative to all forms of row housing and the linear approach to planning.

Tessellation can be done with shapes other than the regular hexagon. The square can be tessellated too; despite the advantage of the hexagon over the square, in terms of efficiency, there are cases where, the orthogonal shapes are more suitable. There are still plenty of shapes that can be used creating, semi-regular tessellations, or non-repeating tessellations and so on. These remain to be investigated.

Other House-Types
Tessellation planning can also be applied to design alternatives to conventional townhouses. In this case, a layout similar to the one described above, simply have separate units upstairs and downstairs.

In the new designs for medium to high rise Tessellation apartments (Fig 5), access corridors are eliminated. Units cluster around a well ventilated and naturally lighted central lobby on each floor which serves as a semi-private meeting area for residents and a safe giant playpen for their children.

In the Tessellation alternative to the traditional South East Asian shop house (Fig 6), the row block is transformed into a perimeter block creating an internal semi-public courtyard; the apartments are accessed from semi-private lobbies on each floor; shops are on the ground floor along the arcade that runs along the whole perimeter of the block.

This complement of solutions provide densities of 10 to 60 units per acre ( units per hectare)

Furthering the concept
In the past few years, my firm has been working towards realising the first projects in Malaysia: there is one that is already under construction; two more have received planning approvals. In doing this work I have had to overcoming scepticism and questions about consumer acceptance, acceptance and approval by local and housing authorities, the orientation of the houses against the sun’s path, access by fire and garbage trucks, way-finding, parking for visitors, maintenance of the pocket parks, and so on. The progress from concept to realization has been steady but slow. I believe that given just a small amount of additional resource it would be possible to realize at a much faster speed, the potential of the Tessellation planning concept in a variety of other countries and social contexts, especially in the Third World.

The proof of concept of Tessellation planning does not require much new investment; mainly it involves research and teaching. I propose to spend the prize money by creating 10 scholarships of USD10 000 each for a one-year Masters level research/design course in a university in Malaysia. The cost of living and tuition in this country is very low and it is already a popular place for post-graduate students from other less developed countries, so this amount will be able to attract very good students. I am confident that I with the prestige of the BFI award, my current links with the local institutions, and my own financial capability, I will be able to run that course.

In a two year period, with 5 students each year, I will aim to achieve:

• The investigation of the potential of tessellation planning in other countries and regions by developing generic designs that are alternatives to their most popular house types,
• Develop further an online multimedia teaching package - Introduction to Tessellation Planning - that is aimed at for students and practitioners,
• Establish a research discipline within the university that will continue work in this field even after the scholarship fund has been fully spent.




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