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 on Oct. 19 in Petaluma, Calif. in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was 89.
His daughter, Julia Van der Ryn, said his death, in 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 Gov. 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 five-acre plot that Mr. Van der Ryn owned in Inverness, Calif., 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.
This form of “outlaw building,” as he and Mr. 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 Governor 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 the architect Peter Calthorpe, which The Architectural Review called “the first large-scale building to embody what we now call sustainable architecture.”
“We became, and still are, the most energy-efficient state in the country,” Mr. Van der Ryn said in a 2011 interview with Volume, an architecture and design magazine. “We reduced energy consumption by 40 percent from what was then the standard.”
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. “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 on 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 the High School of Music & Art in New York (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in 1954, 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, Mr. Van der Ryn 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.
He experienced an epiphany in 1969, when local activists descended on a 2.8-acre parcel of land near the Berkeley campus that the university had cleared to build student housing. Backed by thousands of protesters, the activists claimed the land and began turning it into a community park, despite bloody skirmishes with police and the National Guard, which Gov. Ronald Reagan had called in. They christened it People’s Park.
Mr. Van der Ryn was distressed by the crackdown. “I told the department that I had had enough, and that I wasn’t coming back to teach on campus,” he said in a 2021 interview with Dispatches, a culture magazine.
Despite his threats, he returned to teach at Berkeley, and in 1973 he and Mr. 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., in Mendocino County, for Real Goods, a company selling renewable energy systems. Built on a former dump site, it had a number of green amenities, including 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 is survived by 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, Calif. 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.”
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