Sim Van der Ryn is the president of EcoDesign Collaborative, a northern Californian firm known for its pioneering work on integral design. In fact, Sim Van der Ryn has lived and worked almost exclusively in the ‘sunshine state’: for over 30 years he taught architecture and design at the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1970s he was California state architect, responsible for some of the first energy-efficient, people-friendly, climate-responsive government buildings in the USA.
This book is a series of seminal essays and speeches from his 50-year career and therefore offers a decade by decade perspective on the development of ecological design. There is a list of suggested further reading from each decade.
The book is punctuated by watercolours, which he explains by ‘Whenever I start a new building project, I begin with a day of sitting on site, letting the site speak to me through my eyes, hands, brush and the fluid watercolours.’ This approach is one facet of Ecological Design, the title of the book he published in 1996, and in which he contends that a designer must work not only in concert with nature, but with an understanding of and empathy for the end user and for oneself.
There is no doubt that he has been, and continues to be, what is now called a ‘thought leader’: he was an advocate of post-project evaluation in the 1960s, was talking about closed-loop thinking in 1975, and had adopted whole-life costing long before it became de rigueur in sustainable projects. More than that, he has made ecological design a life-long quest, grounded in practice as well as theory: the 1970s saw the construction of his Energy Pavilion at Berkeley, then the Integral Unban House, then the Farallones Rural Centre, all serving as learning opportunities and as a basis for the development of educational programmes.
He is a stern critic of US urban sprawl, recognising that ‘the story of what happens to our cities will by and large be the story of what happens to our culture’, something that seems almost self-evident in 2014, but was probably less so in 1985 when he wrote it. He diagnoses modern western society as being in a condition of ‘rigid instability’, lacking accountability, transparency or agility, partly on account of the scale of its institutions.
He quotes Eckhart Tolle, ‘The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness … To recognise one's own insanity is … the beginning of healing and transcendence’, and makes a plea for ‘resilient communities’, characterised by, among other things, appreciating the interconnectedness of the whole, using the principles of living systems in design and seeing ourselves as continual learners.
The downside of the book is that there are no photographs of his projects – you will have to buy another of his publications for that. And, by virtue of its nature, there is some repetition in the speeches. But otherwise this reviewer would commend it for its wisdom, if that is not too old-fashioned a word. Although his fame has been achieved through individual projects, many on a community scale, his speeches convey a breadth of understanding – touching on cognitive science, architectural history and public health – and a cogent philosophy. There is also a balance that this reviewer had not quite anticipated in the book; it offers both a critique of western society – ‘burning down the house of life in order to toast marshmallows’ – and an optimism about the human spirit.
Perhaps the highlight of the book for the reviewer is that you can chart in it the quite remarkable life of a man who throughout has followed his own counsel not only to ‘teach what you most want to learn’ but to ‘toss out all your old maps and follow your heart to a new place within and do only what you love.’
