Culture, Architecture and Nature

An Ecological Design Retrospective

Sim Van der Ryn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134632961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Gathering his most compelling essays and addresses from the last fifty years in one accessible volume, this book looks at the pioneering ideas that underpin Sim Van der Ryn's ecological design philosophy. It offers a unique decade-by-decade retrospective of the key issues in environmental design, beginning with the most recent years and looking back to the 1960s. With an introductory chapter and further recommended reading for each decade, this book is key reading for any architect or designer practising today, and students will find a wealth of knowledge with which to support their studies. The author's beautiful illustrations, painted in a corresponding timescale to the chapters, offer further insight into the way he understands the challenges of humanity's stewardship of our planet.

The Two-Thousands and Beyond: A New Radicalism Towards the Integral Paradigm

On September 11, 2001, in a near trance, I stared at the TV screen and watched the planes hit the towers—the burst of flames, the collapse. I watched over and over again, and then I sat down at my desk and wrote an email to a long list of colleagues, saying that this event, as horrible as it is, could serve as a traumatic wake-up call for Americans, requiring that we finally recognize that maintaining our way of life through a dependence on a diminishing stock of global resources is indeed unsustainable.

“Sustainability” was one of the big buzzwords of the 2000s, and not just in architecture. But how can we build more sustainably? Here in the U.S., unfortunately, government and special interests are a major part of the problem. Often, the folks that have the most to gain from a rule change are the ones who write it. Recently, California passed new rules for septic fields, rules that were written by the engineers whose business is to design and build them. The organization called Sightline.org documents regulations that prohibit common sense. In many suburbs, there are ordinances that prohibit drying clothes on an outdoor clothesline, and in one Michigan town a family was cited for growing vegetables on their front lawn. There, the local ordinance permits “only grass.”

Most obstructive to ecologically intelligent design are the code barriers. These include the use of recycled materials, including straw bale and rammed earth, gray water reuse, composting toilets, and many new building-system products. (It took years to get approval for straw-bale construction and gray water reuse, which reuses 50 percent or more of household water.) Codes are necessary, but if we are going to design our way out of the mess we’ve created, codes must be conceived to allow for experimentation with new techniques and methods.

At a 2012 sustainability-policy summit in Santa Barbara, California, hosted by Oasis Design and attended by local officials and regulators from a number of California cities, host Art Ludwig laid out key issues to consider, including the following:

• The culture of regulators and policy makers is grounded in the belief that the current system delivers “the safest buildings in the world.” Yet awareness of emerging risks due to climate chaos, toxics, and other causes is nearly nonexistent. While historical risks have dropped by about half in the last 40 years, emerging risks not covered by existing regulations have more than doubled.

• The action being taken to “green” buildings functions more as a diversion than a remedy. Industry interests have effectively captured large portions of the regulatory apparatus and are managing it for maximum profit.

• Unpermitted centers for research on sustainability in building and infrastructure have been the source of deep green innovation for years but their productivity is being dramatically lessened by tightening regulation, even as their innovation is needed more than ever.

The architecture business has become increasingly corporatized and largely serves those interests. In many cases, the production of construction drawings is outsourced to cheaper labor pools in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere. And for those who are just entering it, the future looks bleak. A Washington Post survey showed that recent graduates of architecture schools have the highest unemployment rate of fifteen college majors, at 14 percent. The lowest were in education and health, at 5 percent.

While the marketing of “sustainability”, “green,” and “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” (LEED) Gold medals is part of every office’s pitch, many ignore the more basic questions of whether the design and uses for a new building are part of the solution or part of the problem. It’s questionable how much impact the U.S. Green Building Council’s popular LEED rating system has had on the reduction of fossil-fuel energy use in buildings, or how much it’s reduced pollution and increased indoor air quality, because the system is based on design criteria and calculations rather than on measuring actual performance of a completed project. Until post-occupancy evaluation of actual building performance becomes the standard for learning from built examples, LEED appears as little more than a marketing tool. The USGBC needs to LEEP beyond LEED.

The International Living Building Challenge, developed by Jason McLennan of the Cascadia Green Building Council, is a major leap forward toward a more integrative, comprehensive, and inspiring approach to improving the art and science of designing and constructing built environments. The mission statement reminds us that, “we have only a few decades to reshape humanity’s relationship to nature and bring our ecological footprint to within the planet’s carrying capacity. Green progress is minute and barely recordable.”

The Challenge addresses design related to site, water, energy, health, materials, equity, and BEAUTY (a dirty word in architecture), and it even includes spirit, inspiration, and educational value as criteria. Every project under consideration has to address a set of specific imperatives, with design solutions that demonstrate proven performance rates rather than anticipated outcomes. Urban agriculture, car-free living, biophilia, a human scale, rights to nature, ecological water flow, carbon footprint, and appropriate materials sourcing, construction, and removal are among them. Furthermore, the Challenge requires that 100 percent of a project’s water come from rainwater or a closed loop; 100 percent of building energy must be produced on site; buildings must have operable windows; and materials must be supplied from within 500 miles.

While there has been much progress in terms of both awareness and action toward living and building more sustainably, we have a long way to go, in all sectors. And we can’t overlook the fossil-fuel industries and their political power.

Of our total U.S. energy supply, the sun supplies less than 1 percent. Our best soils continue to erode from the production of corn and soybeans, most of which end up feeding animals and as major ingredients of junk food. The climate and resource clocks are ticking. It’s a good time to recognize that the word “radical” means “root.” We need to get to the root of the systems we’ve designed, the ones that are killing us.

“Transformation,” Keynote, Cascadia Green Building Council, Seattle, WA, 2009

INTRODUCTION

The Transformation we are engaged in is transforming the world we now live in towards one that continues the gift of life to our future generations and all other forms of life with which we share this planet. For the first time in human history, what was always assumed as a certainty is no longer certain. The question is not saving the planet. The question is can we redesign human life to restore the planet’s ability to support and sustain us? We all hear the continuous drum roll of depressing planetary news. Tonight I want to take you on a ramble through the landscape of our human story, some things I’ve learned, where we are now, what we can do, and what we can learn.

“The Great Turning” is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. I’ve been on this design journey for most of my life, bouncing along through hope, some accomplishments, and occasional despair as the question is always there, “Can we do it?” Forty years ago E.F. Schumacher gave us a useful answer:

Can we rely on it that a ‘turning around’ will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer “yes” would lead to complacency; the answer “no” to despair. It’s desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.

THE HUMAN STORY AND THE GREAT TURNING

… Studying human cultural history for many years …

THE ECO-LOGIC STORY

A few trends: ecosystems: fresh water, oceans, forests, soils, wetlands …

Energy:

16 trillion watts total global energy demand almost all from carbon sources … if we want to cap carbon at 450 ppm by 2035 we will have to reduce to only 3 trillion watts from carbon (Stewart Brand: Whole Earth Discipline).

German Govt. says U.S. would have to be carbon neutral by 2020 to avoid worst climate chaos scenario.

Cities:

A billion people live in informal squatter cities mostly in developing world (op. cit. Brand).

Population:

Birth rate in developed world continuing to fall together with aging population.

Globally half of population is under 24, 85 percent in developing world.

Are we burning down the house of life to toast marshmallows?

THE THREE “R”s

Peter Calthorpe and I wrote one of the first books with the “S” word—Sustainable Communities—in 1986 (now back in print through New Society Publishers).

In the Introduction, I wrote,

Sustainability is defined by its context. Sustainability implies that the use of energy and materials in an urban area be in balance with what the region can supply continuously through natural processes such as photosynthesis, biological decomposition, and the biochemical and natural ecological processes that support life. The immediate implications of this principle are a vastly reduced energy budget for cities, and a smaller, more compact urban pattern interspersed with productive areas to collect energy, grow crops, and recycle wastes.

That was an OK if naive beginning twenty-five years ago. My trusty 1993 Random House Unabridged Dictionary has no definition for either of the words “sustainable” or “sustainability,” suggesting that even etymologists couldn’t figure out what we were talking about. So I looked up how the dictionary defines “business” and it says, “The purchase and sale of goods in an attempt to make a profit.” Then I happened to read that the Swedish word for “business” is “nar lingings liv” and it literally means “what supports life”! Yes, there’s a world of difference between making a living and making a life.

“Saving the Planet,” “Green,” “Sustainable” are warm, fuzzy, terms without clearly shared meaning, values, and actions. What is meant by terms such as “Green” and “Sustainable” is far from transparent and too often becomes an excuse not to address fundamental issues. The use of the term “sustainability” gives us a false sense of security in that it implies that it is possible through technological change to design our way out of larger processes of ecological collapse and climate chaos.

The three “R”s for twenty-first century design are restoration, regeneration, and resiliency. This means integrating building design within a larger context of community design and the integral ecological design of food, water, energy, and recycling systems at every scale. Most of today’s middle school students know the mantra, “materials cycle, energy flows, life webs.” Today’s designers need to imprint that mantra into their awareness.

The interactions among the natural world and the built environment on an urban, regional, and global scale are far too complex to lend themselves to simple metrics such as the term “sustainability” suggests. The problem with the word “sustainability” is similar to the problem with Wall Street’s cunning phrase, “collaterized debt instruments.” No one—including all the geniuses on Wall Street—knew what in hell they were buying and selling and a year later they still don’t. As one Wall Street wizard quoted in a New Yorker article said, “So we trade chicken shit and call it ‘chicken breasts.’ No one knows the difference or really cares.”

We know the big drivers—pollutants such as CO₂ and thousands of toxins in our soil, water, and bodies. We know climate has turned weird and unpredictable. We know remaining stocks of oil, gas, and coal have peaked and will have to be replaced with renewable energy from sun, wind, and biomass conversion. We know that the suburban dream is turning into a nightmare, that our infrastructure is rotting away, that in spite of the work of many good people, key ecosystems—forests, wetlands, good soils, fresh water, and ocean life—are endangered worldwide.

I used to rant to my Italian Swiss mechanic friend Rico about these issues; he sighed, rolled his eyes, and muttered something in his Valtellina dialect. “What did you say?” I asked. “It’s an old observation from our region. ‘People are like potatoes. They open their eyes only when they are up to their neck in shit.’” That colorful folk wisdom is an organic restatement of the fact that for a million years or more we have been wired only to respond to immediate physical threats. Comfort and denial take care of more distant threats.

We live in descriptions of reality, not reality itself. Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, Charles Mann’s 1491, and Amy Chua’s Day of Empire are recent works that tell the story of great societies throughout human history that collapsed because their rigid structures of belief could not adapt to new challenges, and through rigid denial overshot their ecological base.

Rigid structures—mental and physical—are unstable because they don’t adapt easily to change. What we need to create are Resilient Communities. What does that mean? Quoting from my dictionary, “resilient” means “Spring back, rebound, the ability to return to the original form after having been compressed or stretched … recovery from illness, depression, adversity.”

I’ve called it different things at different times but my lifetime belief has been that architecture is more than form and function. It’s about the integration of all the elements that allow buildings to be what they are—organisms, and cities to be complex ecosystems. I was deeply influenced in architecture school in the fifties by becoming a member of the newly created Whole Systems Society that was trying to develop more wholistic approaches to the sciences. Bucky Fuller whom I studied with opened my eyes to design beyond the building envelope to consider all the forces that shape an environment without which neither buildings nor we can live.

What this means is that the design for a building or a city has to design for and integrate the flow of energy, water, waste, food, characteristics of land, place, culture, and history into its design. Organisms and ecosystems also change and evolve over time and that’s also part of the equation.

I tested my ideas as “thought experiments” thro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Books by Sim Van der Ryn
• Introduction: Nature’s Mad as Hell
• PART 1 The Two-Thousands and Beyond: A New Radicalism Towards the Integral Paradigm
• PART 2 The Nineties: Integrating the Ecologies of Nature, Culture, and Humans
• PART 3 The Eighties: The Lost Decade
• PART 4 The Seventies: The Environmental Awakening and Response
• PART 5 The Sixties: Questioning the Dominant World View, Ethos, and Paradigm
• Index