Sim Van der Ryn's Outlaw Building

In summer 1968, disillusioned after the failure of People’s Park, Sim Van der Ryn, Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley, abandoned the city for a small cabin in Inverness, thirty-five miles north along the Pacific coast. Architects had to build new, de-centred institutions based on ecological principles, he argued. That year, he began the first of his ‘outlaw builder studios’, Arch 284, which brought recycling, DIY, and inflatables into local primary schools. Arch 181: Making a Place in the Country followed in 1972, co-organised with former student Jim Campe over ten weeks at a five-acre site in Marin County: ‘a learning situation directly connected to life’s flows, survival, sharing skills’, Campe declared. This paper will discuss the outlaw builder studios in relation to Van der Ryn’s evolution as a designer and educator up to his involvement with the Farallones Institute, established in 1974, and within the broader context of an emerging first-generation ecological design in the US. It will closely analyse these courses’ visuality, pedagogy, and appropriate technologies, which abandoned the principles of design science, a legacy of the Bauhaus diaspora that Van der Ryn previously supported, for ‘whole systems design’. The diagrams and plans of the outlaw builder studios, for example, were less scientific than ludic or permutational and were tools for collaborative learning. Similarly, course materials mimicked DIY manuals and countercultural ephemera as Van der Ryn and his students sought to integrate Bay Area communitarianism into environmental design education.