Design For Life

by Van Der Ryn, Sim

• ISBN13: 9781586855307
• ISBN10: 1586855301
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-08-29
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Roots and Seeds

Branching Out

First Generation Ecological Design

Second Generation Ecological Design

Places of Heart and Spirit

Making the Great Leap

Forward

Epilogue

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

"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.