[We pay tribute to another great Silverback who has gone to that Great Jungle in the sky, Sim Van Der Ryn. It was my honor and pleasure to be involved in the early stages of the creation of the Real Goods Solar Living Center in Hopland, CA. Later I worked with Real Goods founder and president Silverback John Schaeffer (Mendocino Bonobos) in chronicling the project with the publication of A Place in the Sun. SB SM]
Mr. Van Der Ryn, at his home in Inverness, Calif, in 2005. He emerged from the back-to-the-land movement in the early 1970s to become a leader in green energy buildings at the University of California Berkeley. PETER DASILVA/NYT
Sim Van der Ryn, a Dutch-born architect who emerged from the back-to-the-land movement in the early 1970s to become the California state architect, charged with designing sustainable buildings that eventually earned him the sobriquet “father of green architecture,” died Oct. 19 in Petaluma, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was 89.
His daughter, Julia Van der Ryn, said his death, at a live-in memory-care facility, was caused by complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
A self-described “hippie with hubris,” Mr. Van der Ryn taught architecture at the University of California Berkeley, from 1961 to 1995, a span interrupted by a four-year stint in the 1970s as Governor Jerry Brown’s design guru. “As Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were to the women’s movement,” a 2005 profile in The New York Times observed, “so Mr. Van der Ryn has been to green design.”
Early in his teaching career, Mr. Van der Ryn was swept up in the countercultural ethos that consumed the Berkeley campus in the 1960s and the beginning of the ’70s, inspiring him to look beyond the formal strictures of traditional architecture to find new ways of working.
In 1971, he put his theories into practice when he and a colleague, Jim Campe, abandoned the bustle of Berkeley for a 5-acre plot that Mr. Van der Ryn owned in Inverness, north of San Francisco, bringing along more than a dozen students for an academic quarter of field study.
During the class, the students lived on-site four days a week. Although many had no construction experience, they built communal structures and living quarters entirely from salvaged materials.
“I wanted to teach what I was just learning to do: making a place in the country,” Mr. Van der Ryn later wrote.
Students worked on the Integral Urban House in Berkeley, Calif. Anne T. Kent California Room/Mar/NYT
This form of “outlaw building,” as he and Campe called it, emphasized hands-on experience and a blithe disregard for government codes and permits. The point was to liberate architects so they could reimagine what a dwelling or office building should be — in practical, Earth-friendly terms.
Those fringe theories began to go mainstream in 1975, when Brown, known for his outside-the-box thinking and environmental advocacy, hired Mr. Van der Ryn. “Sacramento is just a sandbox for us to play in,” Mr. Van der Ryn recalled the governor telling him in his book “Design for Life” (2005). “You can go for what you want. I’m with you.”
At home in that sandbox, Mr. Van der Ryn pioneered the use of sustainable materials, solar energy, and natural ventilation in government buildings. One example was the landmark Gregory Bateson Building, a 250,000-square-foot office complex in Sacramento, designed with a team also headed by architect Peter Calthorpe, which The Architectural Review called “the first large-scale building to embody what we now call sustainable architecture.”
Mr. Van der Ryn’s Earth-first approach was all the more notable given that he came of age in the profession at the height of the architectural movement known as the International style, epitomized by the glassy minimalism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who famously preached that “less is more.”
“Most people think buildings are sculptural objects or works of art,” Mr. Van der Ryn told Volume in 2011. “But my view has always been that buildings are organisms and ecosystems, and humans make up an important part of those systems. Architecture critics never review buildings in terms of humans.”
Simon Herman Van der Rijn was born March 12, 1935, in Groningen, the Netherlands, the youngest of three children of Herman and Henriette (Hartog) Van der Rijn. His father worked in the family metals-distribution business.
The Van der Rijns were Jewish, and with war looming in Europe, they fled to the United States. On Sept. 1, 1939, the day Nazi forces invaded Poland, they departed on a ship bound for New York City. There they changed the spelling of their surname to make pronunciation easier for English speakers.
After graduating from what now is the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, Mr. Van der Ryn enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1958. He turned down an offer from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the powerhouse architecture firm, before joining the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor.
In the 1960s, he traveled around California and New Mexico, studying the hippie communes that were popping up and finding inspiration in their practical strategies for living off the land.
In 1973, he and Campe oversaw the construction of what they called the Energy Pavilion, an unsanctioned structure on campus that showcased their latest energy-saving ideas. (The university demanded that it be torn down.) He also helped found the Farallones Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to renewable technologies.
In 1974, the group transformed a Victorian home in Berkeley into the Integral Urban House, a laboratory for self-sufficient living equipped with a solar water heater and solar oven, a composting toilet, and a gray-water recycling system, as well as a chicken coop, a vegetable garden, and beehives. Fine Homebuilding magazine later called the project “the birth of green.”
Among Mr. Van der Ryn’s many projects over the years was a showroom in Hopland, Calif., for Real Goods, a company selling renewable energy systems. Built on a former dump site, it had green amenities like waterless toilets, solar panels, and a fully passive heating and cooling system. The showroom used some 90 percent less energy than a standard retail building of its size. In 1999, the American Institute of Architects included it on its annual Earth Day Top Ten list, which recognizes notable environmentally sensitive architectural projects.
Mr. Van der Ryn’s marriages to Mimi Wolfe, Ruth Friend, and Gale Parker ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, he leaves two sons, Micah and Ethan; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
After retiring from academia, Mr. Van der Ryn continued working as the president of Van der Ryn Architects, based in Sausalito.
Throughout his long career, he never abandoned his core principles.
“The problem with architectural ideology was that it was ideology,” he told Archis. “But I wanted to know how architecture really related to human beings, and I didn’t see any answers in the ideology.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Grateful to Silverback again for sharing knowledge that I would have otherwise overlooked. Unlike the last time (when I expressed my thanks about an historic event that had the world had forgotten), here is a significant contemporary who has been widely recognized for his contribution to the future of our species.