Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn

by Sim Van der Ryn. Published by Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City, Utah. Hardcover, 2005, 182 pages, $39.95.

No history of today’s green building movement can be complete without including the momentous role of Sim Van der Ryn. In this beautiful, coffee-table-style book, Van der Ryn showcases and explains his architecture, provides a personal account of his amazing career, and describes the philosophy behind his approach.

Having instigated so many pivotal initiatives, Van der Ryn is in a unique position to describe how they occurred and the underlying connections among them. His book

Dorms at Berkeley, for example, was seminal in the evolution of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of buildings. And he was among the founders of the storied Farralones Institute (now the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center), where Peter Calthorpe (now better known for his pedestrian-friendly urban designs) built and tested a cluster of solar residences. Each of these chapters from Van der Ryn’s career is covered in two or three well-illustrated pages and provides just a glimpse into an episode that could make up an entire book.

Constantly pushing the limits, nearly all of Van der Ryn’s endeavors have been controversial on some level. While there is a sense of “setting the record straight” in these accounts (other participants would no doubt describe them differently), he doesn’t shrink from describing his own weaknesses and learning experiences. Indeed, co-learning—whether with students at U.C. Berkeley, with colleagues, or with clients—is a key part of his approach to design and to life.

In the book’s final chapter, Van der Ryn switches from the role of story-teller to that of cultural historian, anthropologist, and philosopher. These ideas don’t flow as easily as his stories, but they are rich and provocative nonetheless. He lays out a view of human evolution, culminating in a vision of a cultural shift from our current materialistic, dualistic worldview to an integral and ecological consciousness. He describes ecological design, based on an understanding of natural flows and principles, as the architectural manifestation of this emerging cultural shift. In doing so, he continues the trajectory of his amazing career from the past on into the future. With this book, Van der Ryn has created yet another valuable element in his legacy to the sustainable design movement.

– NM