EYE ON DESIGN BY DAN GREGORY

Reclaim, Recycle, Refresh

It’s a cliche to say the New Year is a time for reinvention and renewal but we are in a time when old ideas definitely need to be looked at in new ways — and that particular cliche happens to be on sale at Macy’s and WalMart anyway, so we’ll take it. Architectural historian Vincent Scully, one of my professors at Yale, used to say there are very few really new ideas and that many great ideas simply come from changing an old idea’s frame of reference. That’s what Houseplans.com is all about: adapting house design to a new reality: i.e. today’s economics and the Web. We want to reinvent how you design and build your home by taking advantage of the flexibility, diversity, and affordability that the Internet provides.

For example, in this time of great change — and new year’s resolutions — how do you build a greener, more eco-friendly home? I recently interviewed one of the country’s experts on this subject: architect, teacher, and author Sim Van Der Ryn, who was the California State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown and helped launch the discipline of user-friendly passive solar design more than forty years ago.

I photographed him at home. New York Times design writer Patricia Leigh Brown has called Sim the “Albus Dumbledore of Green architecture…the intrepid pioneer of the eco-frontier.” It’s a fitting honorific. His most recent book, Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van Der Ryn (published by Gibbs Smith, 2005) is shown below.

It tells the story of his early years teaching at U. C. Berkeley (Hogwarts it wasn’t, however) where he pioneered the study of how people actually use new buildings, through his establishment of California’s first eco-friendly building policies, to recent green building design and consulting work. One of his most famous buildings and one that’s definitely worth a visit is the Real Goods Solar Living Center (flagship store for Real Goods, the largest supplier of solar living products and solar electric systems in the country) in Hopland, California, completed in 1996 — it’s the spiraling design beside the chambered nautilus on the book’s cover.

I particularly like this quote from the book: “The building should tell a story about a place and people and be a pathway to understanding ourselves within nature.” Nature and the art of collaboration have always been his greatest teachers.

Sim started his career at the age of fifteen when he worked for a dairy farmer in New Hampshire building — I am delighted to relate — a stock plan house from Popular Mechanics. First, he told me, good design is green because it takes into account proper orientation to sun and weather, and the use of materials appropriate to climate, site, and use. In addition, the easiest way to make a house more eco-friendly is to use sustainably harvested, recycled, or reclaimed materials in its construction. (And recycling is all about changing the frame of reference.) I think we should capitalize on this idea by rounding up Web resources in this area. Here’s a start:

For siding and flooring, consider Terramai, a company with offices in California and New York that sources reclaimed wood from around the world. All of its products are Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified.

This is a Terramai example of reclaimed wood used for siding.

And here’s one of reclaimed wood flooring.

For  the kitchen, consider Neil Kelly Cabinets, from Portland, OR.

Neil Kelly custom cabinets are made with FSC-certified woods, no-added formaldehyde agriboard case/drawer materials and low VOC (volatile offgassing compound)-glues, adhesives and finishes.

How about furniture? Harvest Home specializes in handcrafted furniture from reclaimed timber, like this bench in their Tahoe Collection.

Or here’s the Auburn chair from the same collection:

We’ll keep adding to our resource listings for eco-friendly construction and finishing materials. If you find some great leads in this area, please let me know.