The ecotistical approach defines the scope of the design solution by examining needs and limits. 'Needs' are the conditions necessary to meet required and basic standards. 'Limits' are the ability of the conditions to fulfill present and future needs.

To every unique building, site or behavioral design challenge, the ecotistical approach seeks to achieve an unequivocal symmetry: concern for culture and tradition; captured aesthetics; embodied proportion, scale, and texture; a functional reality-based end-product, and calculable reductions in fundamental and continuing environmental, economic and human costs.