Design For Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn - Hardcover

Van Der Ryn, Sim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586855301 ISBN 13: 9781586855307

Publisher: Gibbs Smith, 2005

Synopsis

Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn surveys the work and principles of Sim Van der Ryn, a world leader in the field of sustainable architecture. Sharing his years of experience as a teacher and using his building designs as examples, the author shows us that buildings are not objects but organisms, and cities are not machines but complex ecosystems.
Design for Life illustrates how Van der Ryn came to see the shifting patterns in nature and how these patterns profoundly affect how people live and work in the structures we build. Van der Ryn explores how architecture has created physical and mental barriers that separate people from the natural world, and how to recover the soul of architecture and reconnect with our natural surroundings. Appointed California State Architect by then-Governor Jerry Brown, Van der Ryn introduced the nation's first energy-efficient government building projects. His vision heralded a Golden Age of ecologically sensitive design and resulted in the adoption of strict energy standards and disability access standards for all state buildings and parks. Van der Ryn has helped inspire architects to see the myriad ways they can apply physical and social ecology to architecture and environmental design.
Sim Van der Ryn is the president of Van der Ryn Architects, a northern California firm known worldwide for its work in sustainable architecture. He taught architecture and design at the University of California, Berkeley for more than thirty years, inspiring a new generation to create buildings and communities that are sensitive to place, climate, and the flow of human interactions. He is the author of six groundbreaking books about planning and design, including Sustainable Communities and Ecological Design. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.

About this title

About the Author

Sim Van der Ryn is the president of Van der Ryn Architects, a northern California firm known worldwide for its work in sustainable architecture. He taught architecture and design at the University of California, Berkeley for more than thirty years, inspiring a new generation to create buildings and communities that are sensitive to place, climate, and the flow of human interactions. He is the author of six groundbreaking books about planning and design, including Sustainable Communities and Ecological Design. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.

From the Back Cover

Somewhere in the last century, architecture lost its soul. Modern culture developed the wealth, the power, and the technology to create structures that once seemed impossible. While the larger-than-life skyscrapers and the coldly post-modern structures of our time do inspire a detached sense of awe and wonder, very few appear to have qualities that truly move us...
When was the last time you were moved to tears by a building, or did not want to leave a building you were in because the place touched you at such a deep level? When was the last time you shivered, ecstatic, in a manmade place that tugged at something deep inside of you?
Buildings are not objects; they are organisms. Cities are not mechanical assemblies; they are ecosystems. Through ecological design, our buildings and cities can become more fully integrated with nature. Like organisms, they can produce their own energy, and consume and recycle their own wastes without polluting. Design can show use the connection between nature's cycles, the living and the built environment...
Our global crisis is also a design crisis as civilization shifts from design processes and products formed in the image of the machine to design based on the forms and processes of the intricately ordered web of life. I lay out the characteristics of the emerging integral worldview and integral design. As Gandhi said, "We must be the change we want to see." This is the essence of actively living with hope.
--Sim Van der Ryn

From the Inside Flap

Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn surveys the work and principles of Sim Van der Ryn, one of the world's most important leaders in the field of sustainalbe architecture. Sharing his years of experience as a teacher and using his building designs as examples, the author shows us that buildings are not objects but organisms, and cities are not machines but complex ecosystems. Fleeing Holland just weeks before Hitler's invasion, the Van der Ryn family settled in the outskirts of New York City. Young Sim grew up exploring the tiny pockets of grass, puddles, and swamps he found in Queens. An avid high school art student, he progressed to studying architecture in college. But he found the pervading modernist-style buildings to be emotionally cold and lacking human sensitivity. He longed for a way to restore architecture back to life. His breakthrough came during the frequent campus visits of R. Buckminster Fuller, who inspired him to think and design with the geometries of the natural world. Design for Life shows how the young architect began to look at the world with new eyes and saw the shifting patterns in nature and how these patterns profoundly affect how we live and work in the structures we build. Using his own projects and teaching experiences as examples, the author reveals the evolution of his thinking and the emergence of a new process of collaborative design that honors the buildings' users and connects them to the Earth. The book shows how architecture has created physical and mental barriers that separate us from our world, but how we can recover the soul of architecture and reconnect with our natural surroundings. Sim Van der Ryn is the president of Van der Ryn Architects, a Northern California firm known for its work in sustainable architecture. He taught architecture and design at the University of California, Berkeley, for over 30 years, inspiring a new generation to create buildings and communities that are sensitive to place, climate, and the flow of human interactions. Appointed California State Architect in the 1970s by then-Governor Jerry Brown, Van der Ryn introduced the nation's first energy-efficient government building projects. His vision and persuasive skills heralded a golden age of ecologically sensitive design and resulted in the adoption of strict energy standards and disability access standards for all state buildings and parks. As the author of six groundbreaking books about planning and design, including Sustainable Communities (1986, with Peter Calthorpe), Ecological Design (1996, with Stuart Cowan) and numerous articles, Van der Ryn has helped inspire architects to see the myriad ways they can apply physical and social ecology to architecture and environmental design. The author lives and works in Northern California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"At its boldest, architecture is a statement of an image of living, for the form living takes is the germ of an architecture." -Rob Straus, former student. Outlaw Building News, 1971

Where has beauty gone? Since our emergence as a species, humans have been making places and spaces. We've been designing them for the last thirty thousand years. All that practice has made us better at producing more material things, and doing it faster and cheaper. Our advancements in science and technology have provided the knowledge and tools that have allowed us to shape the material world in utterly fantastic ways. But we have lost our ability to create places of beauty, comfort, and durability that fit both the natural world and our own human nature.

Architecture speaks volumes about the culture from which it springs. It is the physical manifestation of values, ideas, hopes, and dreams. Architecture is the human habitat, the environment of our own creation, the skin that separates us from the natural world. It is also a series of walls-physical and mental-that compartmentalize our perception of the world. It doesn't have to be.

Sometime during the last century, architecture lost its soul. Modern culture developed the wealth, power, and technology to create structures that once seemed impossible. While the larger-than-life skyscrapers and the coldly postmodern structures of our time do inspire a detached sense of awe and wonder, very few appear to have qualities that truly move us. Buildings that we truly love are buildings that last. In our modern cities, there are very few that are loved. Beauty and spirit were integral to the works of earlier cultures and times. Today in Bali they still say, "We have no art; we just do everything well."

When was the last time you were moved to tears by a building, or did not want to leave a place because it touched you at such a deep level? When was the last time you shivered, ecstatic, in a man-made place that tugged at something deep inside of you? We travel around the world to experience great works of architecture and cities of the past, but the architecture in which we spend most of our lives leaves us empty.

Our buildings, our suburbs, and most of our cities are cold, lifeless, and disconnected from people. They are uninspiring. To inspire is to breathe life into. How can we make the buildings of our everyday lives fit our deepest human needs? We can design environments that inspire and nourish our souls, bringing architecture into deeper connection with our innermost self.

How can we reconnect buildings and cities to the cycles and flows of the natural world that are the basis for all life on earth? The creation of buildings and the systems that support them-energy, water, waste, roads-is the largest industry in the United States and the industrialized world. This industry is the largest user of energy, materials, and open land and it is the largest polluter of air, water, and soil. We are still designing and building as though resources are unlimited, without regard to the waste and pollution caused by the construction and operation of buildings and the infrastructure necessary to support them.

Edition details

• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1586855301
• ISBN 13: 9781586855307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192