Q&A: Sim Van der Ryn, of Van der Ryn Architects

Sim Van der Ryn

Sim Van der Ryn of Van der Ryn Architects does not see the world in just black and white, but in green. Believing that form should follow flow, he sees everything from single-family housing to office buildings as living organisms that should fit in with their environments.

An expert in green building design, construction and materials, Van der Ryn explores the use of sustainable design and architecture as a way to form a connection and mutual relationship not only between building and occupant, but also between building and environment.

He implemented California ‘s first energy-efficient office building program during his tenure as state architect under Gov. Jerry Brown and founded the Farallones Institute in the 1970s.

Van der Ryn is the author of six books, including “Ecological Design”, with Stuart Cowan, and “Sustainable Communities”, with Peter Calthorpe. He is a researcher, educator, former faculty member of the University of California , Berkeley , and an advisor to Ecosa Capital.

During a conference titled “Investing in the Future: a Green Schools Symposium” held at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, Van der Ryn discussed with Green Building News the definition of sustainable architecture, strategies for raising awareness of green building, and the concept of bioclimatics.

Q: How do you apply principles of physical and social ecology to architecture and environmental design?

A: I think first by recognizing that principles exist, which are not taught, certainly not in architecture schools. One way I got into all of this was to say, “Here’s this building that’s won these awards; why don’t we start observing and talking to the people who actually occupy it and find out what they think and observe their behavior and so on?”

The social ecology part really gets ignored; the only people that really approach it as a science are businesses whose interests are in consumer behavior generated by buying stuff. In terms of occupancy evaluation, I’d say most of the research there has been done in health care. There are a lot of studies, quite famous studies. A whole series done by Roger Ulrich at the University of Kansas studied hospital patient recovery rates and found that people who have a view of green, growing stuff have a quicker recovery than if they’re just staring at a blank wall.

That field has never really developed, although there have been particular exceptions like Ulrich, but teaching that relationship between how nature and environment effect social ecology – human ecology – we just don’t know a lot about it.

I think part of the reason is because so much of architecture is influenced by high architecture, what I call “talk-i-tecture”, the theoretical stuff. For them architecture is an art and very often has very little to do with people. There are some celebrity architects whom I would classify as psychopaths. I know of one who loves to design buildings that people hate and that are uncomfortable.

The physical ecology side, I think, is much better understood. I reformulated what Louis Sullivan said about architecture, “form ever follows function.” I always say that, “form follows flow.” And what I’m implying there is that physical ecology exists as a series of flows and cycles, whether it’s a sun cycle, a hydrological cycle or a weather cycle.

One thing I did when I retired from Berkeley is, I said, “I’m going to take the stuff I did with freshmen architects and do it with fourth graders, and I’m going to take the stuff I did with first-year graduate students and I’ll do it with first-year high school students.” It involved doing the mapping of a 700-acre school site, and they were able to produce professional work. So, there’s sufficient understanding of basic stuff.

If we’re going to be green, let’s start with bioclimatics, because that’s the low-hanging fruit. A lot of people aren’t there yet, because they’ve been living with HVAC systems and what not, and they can’t seem to think about doing it another way. There’s a lot of re-education that needs to happen.

Q: In terms of high architecture versus functionality, does green building have its own aesthetic?

A: For me, I always start with site; I want the buildings to really relate to their sites. But I generally don’t deal in highly urban areas, so that gets to be a little more difficult. I think urban constraints definitely evolve a different kind of green building. I like to see nature as foreground. But that doesn’t work in a lot of urban sites.

Does it have its own aesthetic? I think it’s evolving. I have my own preferences, curves versus straight lines, for example. I like to introduce curves into buildings because we spend so much time in boxes. I think the aesthetic is evolving.

What I try to distinguish is the difference between biomorphic, which you could almost read as organic, and ecomorphic. I go for ecomorphic – that is, I want to design buildings or communities that mimic the flows in a natural system. What the form is comes from that. And then there’s the earlier form-driven organic, what I would call biomorphic, where they deliberately want to make the building look like some natural object. They’re copying the form of nature; I’m interested in copying the processes in nature and incorporating those into what I design.

Q: How would you define sustainable architecture?

A: I wrote a book in ’86 called Sustainable Communities, and there we define it as, basically, you’re giving back. There’s a balance between what you’re taking from natural systems and what you’re returning to them. And by that definition, there are very few buildings that are sustainable. And there’s very little in culture that’s sustainable.

I don’t know if you’ve read Michael Pollan, he’s got a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it’s about organic agriculture, and that term has a finite definition in terms of what the inputs are, but the book doesn’t talk at all about scale. He recounts spending five days on a small farm that truly is sustainable; everything gets returned. Then you take Earthbound Farm, a huge industrial operation, that technically is organic. However, on the caloric basis Pollan mentions in the book, it takes Earthbound 47 grams of energy to produce one gram of food. It may be organic, but it’s not sustainable.

It used to bother me the way “sustainability” was thrown around so loosely. I don’t try and define the word. If you talk to people, a lot of them are marketing something and they don’t really understand it. But there are a lot of people that really are trying to protect, restore and rebuild the environments they’re in all over the world. That would be a move toward sustainability.

The difference between regenerative and green in my mind is, like when you look at LEED. I don’t want to knock it; it’s slowing the rate at which things get worse and that’s good. But I’m saying we have to have more radical change in our mindset and in our institutions if we actually want to move toward a truly sustainable environment. We have to move the mechanical and industrial model to a whole other way of thinking, and that isn’t being taught. I’m not saying I know a lot about it, but I know people who practice it, usually working on a small scale.

Q: What new technologies, systems and materials would you advocate for new commercial construction projects?

A: Well in commercial construction, I think you’ve got real problems. What are your choices? With a multi-story building it’s either concrete or it’s steel. They’re both great materials, but from the point of view of the issues that we’re talking about, they have huge problems. With concrete, the manufacturing of cement contributes to eight percent of global warming. All you can do is make it more eco-effective by adding elements to it that have already added carbondioxide to the environment, like fly-ash. With fly-ash, which already has been burned in the power plants and is the residue from burning coal or oil, you’re recycling something that has already contributed to global warming. You don’t have to count it twice. Concrete mixes could use a lot of experimentation with how much fly-ash you add in since it makes concrete considerably stronger.

Steel is the most recyclable material, so that’s good. I’ve been working in Tibet during the summers for the last three years and the Chinese are scouring everywhere in China for any piece of metal they can recycle. They’re talking about 400 million square feet of new construction in the next five or 10 years.

I don’t think we have very many good choices in terms of basic components of large buildings. We just have to live with it.

Brick is pretty good and it lasts a long time, but it depends on how the brick is made. The point about green is there is so much smugness about it because you start to get into the embodied energy issues and they’re very complicated. Now we’re getting into issues with composite materials, and it’s a new kind of struggle that’s going on. The nature timber industry has its own brand, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and they’re trying to get that included as a LEED-acceptable product. The vinyl industry, they haven’t made it yet in terms of certification, but they’re keeping the pressure up.

I don’t know the answer. I guess you accept that you’re going to take the hit with one of these materials and then you’re going to build the best building that you can.

Q: You mentioned regenerative buildings in your talk. I’ve heard about such materials as sedum sod for roofing that provides storm water management. Is that a viable option?

A: Yes, I do a lot of green roofs. It’s interesting, green roofs were developed in Germany for economic reasons. If you fly over L.A. , you see miles and miles of flat roofs on distribution warehouses, etc. All of those are plasticized membranes and they’ve got to be replaced because of the UV factor.

It was the Germans who decided, “If we put these alpine sedums on the roof and develop a system, we can do this in three inches of substrate. These are alpine plants and they’re used to living in poor soils. We’ll have a lifetime roof – we’ll never have to replace the roof membrane.” That’s what they started with.

Is it regenerative? Regenerative is a tricky thing. This new center I started at the College of Marin , I call it the Center for Regenerative Design, because in that case we truly are trying to regenerate this college in both its curriculum and its attraction for students, as well as the campuses. I like regenerative; I can explain that better than I can explain sustainable. For example, I can say, “Well, these are the ways in which we literally are regenerating an environment.”

Q: Would you say that green construction means higher construction costs initially, and then subsequent higher operational costs?

A: It’s almost always lower operational costs, as Tom Leppert, president of Turner Construction, said in his company’s experiences, greening might add three to four percent to costs, and most of them are recoverable in a five-year period; sometimes in even a one-year period. For example, lighting and daylighting you could recover, depending on the energy costs. Renewable energy, that’s a longer payback, but as I say, that’s so related to all the false subsidies. You can’t compare it to oil-based electricity, because that oil-based electricity is so heavily subsidized and the costs are hidden.

Environmental Building News had an issue about survivability. The next criterion is going to be designing buildings that can continue to be used if there is no power grid, if the grid is down. Our infrastructure is so vulnerable and climate change is going to make it more vulnerable, so that’s a useful criterion.

You can measure the effectiveness of buildings. The next question is, can you operate, say, a school, if the electric grid is down? If the water is down? Those are questions that are not so far-fetched today.

Q: Can you talk a little more about that additional three to four percent range in initial construction costs?

A: As compared to standard construction, if you’re doing green construction, it’s the added cost of extra controls, mechanical systems and higher- grade windows. If you take a basic case building and decide to green it, you’re adding a lot of standard measures, many of them having to do with control systems. For example, lights that go off automatically, which is not an expensive control.

The green buildings I’ve done haven’t cost any more than the standard buildings. But conservatively, I tell clients, “Depending on what you want to do, you might spend five percent more to do it, but then you need to do the life-cycle costing.” This is an idea that I’m going to start following up with, a new curriculum for having people audit their own homes. I have to do it in my own house. I have a 15-year old refrigerator – I know it’s an energy hog. I can just hear how much it’s on. You need the tools to go measure it, but I bet you that I could pay for a $2,000 refrigerator at today’s energy rates in three years.

Q: Would you say that many in the industry shy away from being LEED certified, due to the costs of commissioning and consultants to calculate the necessary points for certification?

a: I think that what’s happening is that more and more clients are demanding it. They hearing about it and getting on the bandwagon. Turner was early, and now there’s a number of others. At College of Marin I work with Swinerton, that’s another big one. They all see it as good business, added business.

Q: Can you tell me about the energy-efficient office-building program that you implemented when you were the State Architect of California under Gov. Jerry Brown?

A: I didn’t have much familiarity with large buildings when I went into that job. We didn’t do a lot of large office buildings. I just went into the legislative hearing and I had a gallon gas can and little a Japanese teacup and I said to the committee, “See this gallon of gas? This represents how much Btu energy it takes to heat, light and cool a square-foot of state office space today. My goal is to reduce that amount by 90 percent.” They said, “Yeah, that’s good, we can do that,” and they approved the program.

Our first major building was called the Bateson Building , and it reduced energies by about 70 percent from the old standard, which was about 140,000 Btu. Out of that we got Title 24, which makes the commercial standard somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 Btu. A lot of people in the business think that you can knock down 90 percent. In specialized hospitals, when you’re talking about health care, that may not be possible because of the equipment.

I was appointed state architect not so long after the energy shock of ’73, so people were paying attention to this stuff. After a 20-year hiatus, they’re starting to pay attention again.

Q: Have you noticed a shift in the building industry toward integrating sustainability into building projects?

A: Yes, in different sectors. The large-production homebuilders, I think a lot of them are skeptical. They figure people don’t pay attention to what they’re paying in utility bills. But I think the business model is changing. More and more corporations are getting it and they are making changes.

Q: How can commercial facilities best address the increase in natural gas and oil prices, and the subsequent shortages?

a: By reducing their consumption. In existing buildings, those are larger issues of controls. They can upgrade controls and systems, like lighting.

Q: You’ve mentioned some industry newsletters and books. If operations managers and facilities directors wanted to learn more about sustainable design and maintenance, what kinds of resources are available to them?

a: There’s a lot of self-learning to be done. USGBC is the biggest marketer in the game. Their answer is taking the LEED accreditation. I don’t think that’s enough. I just think that it’s a constant learning process of asking the questions and looking for the answers. There are conferences like this one. Maybe someday there will be yearlong sustainable program.

Q: What are some of the best principles you adhere to when you start the design of a new building, whether it’s a hospital, school or office building?

a: If you go to the book Ecological Design, there really are five principles there. The first thing is to design for place. Know where you are, which starts with climate and culture and other things.

The second thing – this is like an early precursor to LEED – is using ecological accounting to help form the design. So, LEED is an ecological accounting system.

The third is design with nature, and that prompts things like biomimicry, and an understanding of basic ecological systems and ecology, which isn’t required. You have to take calculus to become an architect now, but you don’t have to take any natural science courses.

The fourth principle is to honor every voice in the design process. I think that’s key. To design a building, I always work in a charette format, a truly open, collaborative process. That’s the only way I work now. I don’t want a linear process; I want the client, the builder and the conceptual design team, which in my case always includes a number of green experts, together at the same time.

To me, design is collaboration. It’s a collaborative effort that builds a mindset. People want to start with numbers, particularly in this industry. Let’s start with what is possible and then ask ourselves why don’t we go for the impossible? Really go with people’s aspirations, because if you don’t start with that, how will you ever get anywhere?