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 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.
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