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A Town Primarily for People: the Five Hundred Year Plan

by L. Gene Zellmer, AIA

224 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1662; ISBN 1-4120-1284-8; US$23.99, C$31.16, EUR20.25, £14.03

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About the Book THE CHALLENGE: Invent a town to solve all suburban problems, meet challenges like Jane Jacobs described; plus comprehensively solve all livability, environmental, and affordability issues. Impossible? IN THIS BOOK: Key historical influences are reviewed with fresh perspectives on current ideas. Entirely new town and home designs are presented. Permanent infrastructure systems, long-term, can save 50% of home cost and add livability. Three-dimensional home site arrangements save costs and offer more privacy, freedom, and flexibility than in suburbia; neighborly potentials are enhanced. While at same as suburban densities, 70% of the same amount of land becomes an integral open space and farming system. The Home Site, Near and Extended Neighborhood with Main Street act as a visual and functional unit for all life's moments, and are designed primarily for each individual's satisfaction. This book describes the entirely new format necessary for a town to meet all these objectives. A Town Primarily for People Enhances Everyone's Best Objectives: - maintains rural country setting. - cars are not seen from people places. - distinctive urban advantages and atmosphere. - convenience makes transit self-supporting. - permanent infrastructure lowers cost. - surrounded by an integral farming system. - comprehensive sustainability for centuries. Each Home Site: - has an ideal location. - is a convenient walk to everything. - is in a cluster of homes around a play area. - front overlooks Main Street activities. - porch is a ringside seat of town and cluster. - enjoys a safe neighborly surrounding. - increases affordability in many ways. - easily changed to meet budget and needs. - has a totally private interior and back yard. - back views hundreds of acres of open country. WHY INVENT A NEW TOWN CONCEPT? Few towns, if any, have been primarily for people. Town plans based on cars make cars necessary. There is no incentive for high quality long-term investment in towns with short-term 25 to 50 year plans, with no truly long-term comprehensive strategy. Current concepts, even if six-story, cannot solve all the problems. In the long-term, they will never solve the basic conflicts between housing eventually needing more land, the environmentalist, landowners, and developers. Everyone's trapped; the concept is the problem. As centuries pass, affordability, livability, and sustainability will be more difficult. General Plans that dictate existing design solutions or are based on cars stifle any truly new ideas. To solve current and future challenges comprehensively requires entirely new concepts, a different paradigm. With insight from the past and today's technology, for the first time in modern history we can design human habitats to function as an integral part of the surrounding natural environment. This new-concept town approaches the efficiency and natural balance common in homes built by many other less intelligent life forms. This new concept is functionally, structurally and financially feasible today. www.sprawlsolutions.com

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About the Author Gene Zellmer's varied experience provides a solid foundation for inventing an entirely new concept for towns. Beginning with all types of farm work, then getting a carpenter apprentice license at 16 and doing carpentry during college summers provided a hands on understanding of materials. It encouraged a practical confidence and interest in inventing anything making work easier, simplified construction techniques and cost control beginning with his early design work. He has been a pioneer in architecture, often years ahead. Inspired by satellites, space suits, and Frie Otto's work, in 1961 he imagined we would eventually have durable fabrics. That would make possible the first new building system for permanent buildings since the Romans 2000 years ago.. His 1965 structural fabric research at MIT resulted, years later, in the world's first applications on a department store, church, residence, and below grade office building. His work has been published internationally and in Time as one the Five Best Architectural Designs in 1981. He has designed home, office, school, bank, convention center, civic, shopping center, apartment, HUD senior and low-income housing, hotel, postal, military facilities, hospital, medical office projects, and new community master plans. One of the clients was the largest apartment developer in the United States for many years. Many projects were given AIA Design Awards of Merit, Honor, and Excellence. Two received the only AIA Enduring Awards for Excellence initially given in his region. There was never enough time, if anything was published, someone else must have arranged for it. The urge to invent resulted in the first applications of silicone rubber to attach & hinge glass, below-grade low energy housing and offices, low-cost housing at 1/4 tract house cost, cooling effects of double metal roof systems, berm-wall construction, earthquake design for a 12-story concrete block housing project, solarium-heated apartments, roof-truss attic room additions and sweat equity housing systems. He formed his own construction development company that built and successfully tested all the ideas too experimental to do on client projects. The development company built Medical and Dental Office Buildings, PUD Offices, Apartment Developments, PUD Duplex Developments, Duplex Subdivisions, Housing Subdivisions and Experimental Private Homes. He completed his Bachelor of Architecture Degree at University of Southern California and Master of Architecture Degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been licensed in California, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Iowa.

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Catalogue Information

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