One afternoon in the winter of 2020, back before Sophie Gregoire Trudeau was among the first hundred or so Canadians to test positive for Corona virus, I ambled downtown to Russell Books - a local landmark for books: used, rare, antiquarian and new. Since my last visit, before leaving for Chicago, the staff had moved more than one half million books across Fort Street to new digs. I went in search of titles on sustainability to stock our book house that was/is to sit on the front lawn as a free library for green thinking. I found a gem.
If Iceland holds the record for percentage of citizens who are published authors, Victoria should get the prize for best town for book lovers. According to my informal survey the number, caliber and scope of bookstores, libraries & book boxes is beyond compare. No wonder ABE Books ( https://www.abebooks.com/rare-books/most-expensive-sales/ever.shtml) based itself here. Russell was one of ABE’s first suppliers. On this visit, still kicking myself for not having bought a vintage Whole Earth Catalogue in my local thrift shop, I spied a cover that looked like same illustrator had had a hand in its design. It was The Integral Urban House. How had I not not known about this seminal work before now? It is the bible of urban homesteading. IUH spoke to me. It must have inspired or influenced someone (maybe Paul Phillip’s) who came to Fernwood in the 1970’s and established the vibe - which the neighborhood has retained to a higher degree than most urban neighborhoods in North America. We devoutly hope out house is an extension of this vision.
What’s not to love (except ourselves for conveniently ignoring what we have known for more half a century) about how to live well and self-sufficiently in the city while consuming less? The instruction manual is here! I went online to look for wrote-ups on the book:
“The history of the IUH (Integral Urban Home) begins in 1972, on the cusp of the impending energy crisis and coinciding with a burgeoning optimism for sustainable living in the post-industrial era. That fall, at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, architects Sim Van der Ryn, Jim Campe, and Carl Anthony developed a novel architectural studio course titled “Natural Energy Design.” Focused on using quantitative studies of natural resources as the “raw data” of architectural design, the course resulted in the publication of the Natural Energy Design Handbook, a guidebook for creating sustainable architecture based on the cycles of energy found in the environment. It was also through the development of this course that Sim Van der Ryn advanced his proposal for an urban ecology movement in architecture he called Whole Systems Design. Within the framework of Whole Systems Design, if the environment could be reduced to a measurable system of resources, architecture could then function as a self-contained ecology within the larger environment, engineered to provide sustainable habitat by utilizing the existing flows of energy between the environment and its inhabitants. Van der Ryn represented his ideas through a number of schematic illustrations and charts, in particular a diagram titled “Energy Flows in A Closed System Habitat,” which represented abstract nutrient, energy, and waste cycles in a closed environment. “ (source: Critical Sustainabilities ). Van der Ryn is among us. The house in West Berkeley where the integral design experiment took place still exists, but the neighborhood has been wildly gentrified. A champion of the eco-frontier, Van der Ryn deserves to be better known. Read more about this remarkable West Berkeley experiment and Vander Ryn in this World Shapers article by Sabrina Richard. And here are the books he published.
I realize that the energy modeling we’re doing is a stripped down version of what Van der Ryn fought for back in 1972.