Sim Van der Ryn

Awards (partial list)

• Rockefeller Scholar in Residence, Bellagio, Italy (1997);
• Nathaniel Owings Award, California Council American Institute of Architects (1996);
• Commendation for Excellence in Technology, California Council American Institute of Architects (1981);
• Guggenheim Fellow (1971)

Published

• Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn (2005);
• Ecological Design (1996) with Stuart Cowan;
• Sustainable Communities (1986) with Peter Calthorpe;
• numerous other books and articles

Q&A

What led you to become a pioneer in ecological design?

My family (Dutch Jews) fled Holland before the invasion in 1939 and moved to New York. I found myself hanging out in leftover pockets of nature in the city. I wanted to be an artist, but my parents made me enroll in architecture school, where I was bored. In my second or third year, though, Buckminster Fuller came to speak, and that kind of woke me up.

After coming to the Bay Area, I taught Descriptive Geometry at UC Berkeley's architecture school with a big Pythagorean compass and chalk at a chalkboard. (Nowadays, people use AutoCAD to do this kind of work). I was horrible at it. The students were always throwing chalk at me when I connected the wrong points. After two semesters I said, the hell with it, and started doing what Fuller did - I'd go to the fruit market and buy an artichoke, a pomegranate, a cauliflower -, and then dissect them, looking for order in the geometric form.

Role of technology

I have never used any kind of computer program; I just draw by hand. In architecture school now, they start teaching students on computers right away, and hardly teach drawing any more. All architecture derives from nature, and from how people behave, so it's a huge deficiency if we don't teach people the difference between looking and seeing. To see, you have to stay in one place and really absorb it.

[Too many] architects make big boxes. If software could help us create much more complex forms, that would help. I would like to see [software makers] take the complexity of nature and make it easy for us to use the elements of nature in our designs.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the world today?

Cultural historians look at human history and identify very few major advances. It's a bit of a race to see if we'll make the next big leap. We cannot rationally will a major leap - you can't have a bunch of guys sitting around in a board room deciding we're all going to change the way we think, the way we live, what makes us happy. On a broad scale, shifts either happen or they don't happen.

My optimism is based on the fact that we've gone through cultural revolutions before, and we're more than overdue for the next one. We're capable of doing it, and maybe there will be a global shift in the way we behave. But I'm worried about the kind of world my grandchildren are going to live in. Our relationship with nature is screwed up. Climate change is inevitable, and the consequences are huge.

It is truly a matter of both danger and opportunity [the Chinese symbol for crisis]. Things like green design are good, but it's not a fundamental change. It's like we're on the Titanic and are using recycled wood for the deck chairs, and hemp cloth for the cushions. It's not enough.

What kind of projects give you hope

The College of Marin [in Marin County, California] is regenerating itself. I've set up a Center for Regenerative Design to redesign the courses and the campus. The opportunity is to be a model to show how we can solve the problems. It's all about communication and community. We have to make it work at the small scale, because the large-scale stuff isn't working.