ABSTRACT
‘The environmental crisis is a design crisis’, declared Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan in their seminal Ecological Design. ‘It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used’ (1996, 9). Van der Ryn was appointed Professor of Architecture by the College of Environmental Design (CED) at UC Berkeley in 1961. He became one of a handful of CED faculty during the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s to experiment with design pedagogies to address ecological and social problems, a time when environmental concerns entered mainstream public discourse and government policy in the US, leading, in 1970, to the National Environmental Policy Act and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Lowell et al. 2009). This chapter studies how these experimental pedagogies at CED used play to advance design that coupled social and ecological responsibilities.
