ABSTRACT
My work life has been spent in education and architecture and what now is called “green,” or “sustainable,” design. When I started teaching at Berkeley as a 25-year-old professor, a wise mentor gave me advice that I have followed through a lifetime of teaching: “Teach what you most want to learn.” What I most wanted to learn was how to design homes, communities, buildings, and cities that are more connected to the flows and cycles of the natural and living world, on which all life—including human life—depends. I taught and learned by designing a series of living–learning experiments in which classes designed and built increasingly more complex structures that connected built environments to the natural world. As we learned we scaled up, from a wilderness building-and-living experience to a model sustainable habitat; and then a real house, a rural village, state and university facilities, and the design for a new community of five thousand people.
