For decades Sim Van der Ryn’s name has been synonymous with design that’s in tune with nature. His career has included stints within the establishment, including professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and California State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown in the late 1970s.

But Van der Ryn is also known for his collaborative countercultural experiments in sustainability, including the Farallones Institute in rural Sonoma County, California, as well as Berkeley’s Integral Urban House—named by Fine Homebuilding as one of the 25 most important houses built in the U.S. since Jamestown. More recently, the Solar Living Center in Hopland, California, stands out among his many design projects that seek to connect buildings to the cycle and flow of nature.

In 1939, when Van der Ryn was four, his family fled Holland to escape the advancing Nazis. Few members of the large Jewish family who remained in Holland survived. As a boy, Van der Ryn sought solace from his family’s grief by spending countless hours immersed in the natural world that thrived in the weedy vacant lots near his home on the outskirts of Queens. Looking back, he believes that’s where the seeds of his life’s work began to germinate. “When you escape one holocaust, you don’t want to be part of creating another,” he writes in Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn (Gibbs Smith, 2005).

We talked at Highland House, Van der Ryn’s “old hippie palace” (as he describes it), which sits on a ridge butting up against the wild lands of Point Reyes National Seashore, 40 miles north of San Francisco.

In school, I did a design project for a museum. This was in Michigan with rain and snow, so my design had a sloping roof with eaves. I’m practical, and I’d already had construction experience by that point. But the professor said the sloping roof and eaves weren’t acceptable. My design did have lots of glass—I learned that much. But I had
to learn much later about where to put glass on a building.

[Laughs.] No. Some schools still don’t. A lot of schools put ideology ahead of common sense. I don’t have an axe to grind about modernism. A lot of people don’t understand what modernism was about, although it’s now close to 100 years later. It represented an overthrow of the old order—of patriarchy, hierarchy, the Hapsburg Empire. It had a strong socialist component. There was a lot of hope that technology and socialism would solve our problems.

Modernism had a huge effect on the shape of our cities: All these glass towers and curtain walls—[they] are giant heat collectors. I do find some quite beautiful, like the Lever House. But most don’t make much sense from an environmental point of view. I’d like to see what Philip Johnson’s energy bills were for his Glass House.

My first criterion is place. Putting ideology first is just wrong. I’m arguing for commonsense solutions that fit place and need.

The hour is late. [Pause.] It is good that people are waking up to the toxicity of materials, conserving resources, health, indoor air quality, and other commonsense things like daylight. But what about spirit? A building’s got to make you feel good. If you don’t feel comfortable in a building, what does that say? We’re wired—at least I’m wired—to
see living things. Biophilia is a very strong influence in my architecture.

There are plenty of smart people behind the U.S. Green Building Council, but we have to get beyond LEED.

We can’t stop there. Rating systems like LEED are just the mechanics. Metrics are important, but there has to be vision and leadership. In a way, this preoccupation with rating systems becomes an excuse for the status quo.

In this fear-based society, people are afraid to ask, What are your aspirations? What is your vision? But not to ask those questions is foolish and irresponsible. I get hired to be the provocateur, to ask the questions that others are afraid to ask.

Seven generations from now, architects will be asking: What the hell were they thinking? Why were they building these buildings? What was their worldview?

The most important thing is to not assume that conventional infrastructure like electricity, water, sewer, and so on are going to be operating all the time.

Yeah. I have grid-intertied solar here, so I’m screwed. What I probably ought to do is put in enough battery-operated solar so I could at least operate our well.

[When I was a professor at UC Berkeley,] I asked questions that no one was asking of the students. The first thing I’d have students in the freshman class do is go find out where your water comes from, your gas comes from, your electricity, your food, where the sewage goes. We would take field trips and literally do those things. And then we said, let’s [design] a house and see if we can disconnect it from Safeway [grocery store], disconnect it from East Bay MUD [the local water utility], disconnect it from PG&E [the local gas and electric utility].

It was an experiment, not saying we want to be survivalists, but [wanting] to see what resources we use, where they come from, and to what extent we can localize them.

We need to find smaller appropriate local scales for basic resources. In areas that have significant sunshine, that would be an argument for having local solar grids where—yes, maybe it’s tied into the big system—but if the big system goes down, there’s a substation and you can redistribute it locally. There are various options, solar isn’t the only one. In some areas it could be district heat, particularly in urban areas. And local catchment for water. At least deal in the local watershed if there is a watershed rather than importing it from so far away. It’s common sense.

All these systems need to be broken down into smaller scales—water, energy, food. And waste too. All my household’s organic waste goes to my chickens. We have Recycle Circus here once a year in West Marin [County], where everybody brings their old junk and other people can pick through it and take what they want for free. Now we’re talking about getting a permanent local free flea market rather than having Waste Management haul it off to a landfill in a remote location.

In terms of global warming, that’s going to be crucial because some of these large central systems are not going to be functioning reliably due to fuel shortages, unpredictable weather, and so on. Some of them are not functioning now. In this area, it’s heartening. Marin County schools are serving more food that is organic and local. In West Marin, we have a commons group. One problem here is that the [National] Park Service [which manages Point Reyes National Seashore] is operating with an obsolete notion about what their mission is. [Even before Europeans arrived], none of this was wilderness. There was a large Miwok population.

And burning the brush. The Park Service wants to restore all this marshland near Point Reyes. I think that’s good, but what I’m pushing for is to take this farm that they’re buying right on the edge of town and work with the community to make it a demonstration of how we can have food production and at the same time have the marsh restoration. They’re not mutually exclusive. The Park Service is operating under this model that nature is good, people are bad.

Yet we are nature.

That’s the fundamental issue. When particularly the West really groks that and acts on it, that would be the nature of a big shift.