Sim Van der Ryn, a visionary architect and an early pioneer of environmentally thoughtful design, died on Friday at a memory care facility in Petaluma. He was 89 years old. 

Long before “sustainability” entered the mainstream lexicon and “green architecture” implied more than a coat of paint, Mr. Van der Ryn was espousing ideals of ecologically conscious built environments, utopian visions that cut against the grain of the world he had inherited. 

As a designer, author, educator and official California state architect in the 1970s under Governor Jerry Brown, he made blueprints for a better place, detailed right down to the roofing and recycled beams.

Mr. Van der Ryn was born on March 12, 1935, in Groningen, a city in the northern Netherlands. He was the youngest of three children in a Jewish family whose roots were in the nonferrous metals trade, a business established by his great-great-grandfather. In 1939, as the Nazi invasion loomed, his family fled to New York City. They left on the first day of World War II.

Amid the rough-hewn urban landscapes of Queens—its boarded-up lots, the maw of subway tunnels and sprawl of concrete—he found beauty in nature’s persistence. Weeds breaking through cracked asphalt, sumac thickets in the city’s marshy periphery, sunlight refracting off puddles and dancing on walls. In his memoir, he recalls being admonished by his mother for holding onto too many artifacts pocketed from his explorations. 

He attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, where he took classes in drawing, painting and sculpture, before enrolling in the University of Michigan’s architecture program. Though he was initially ambivalent about his studies, Mr. Van der Ryn credits a transformative visitation from a “short, peripatetic man” who was “something of a prophet.” 

Buckminster Fuller introduced him to terms like synergy and tensegrity, and to his hallmark geodesic domes—polyhedral structures that echoed the geometries of nature. To Fuller, architecture wasn’t just about form or aesthetics; it was a tool for reimagining ways of living. It was a vision that captivated the young Mr. Van der Ryn.

As he began to question the tacit assumptions that propel design, his philosophy emerged with clarity. To him, architecture wasn’t bound by “form follows function,” as modernist dogma dictated; instead, he saw it as “form follows flow.” He conceived of buildings not merely as static structures but as living expressions of our values—dynamic ecosystems that adapt, evolve and respond to the world around them.

“Design manifests culture,” he would later say, “and culture rests firmly on the foundation of what we believe to be true about the world.” 

Inspired by Fuller’s experiments with geodesic domes, Mr. Van der Ryn created innovative 12-sided tentlike structures that folded like origami accordions. These he offered through a state-funded program as temporary housing for migrant farmworkers in California in the mid-’60s.

After graduating, Mr. Van der Ryn declined a position at the well-respected New York firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and instead headed westward, toward the open spaces and rugged beauty of California. By 1958, he had become one of the youngest faculty members at the University of California, Berkeley. 

There, he encountered Robert Reich, the future labor secretary, who was a teaching assistant for one of his classes. In 1968, they co-authored “Notes on Institutional Building,” a treatise advocating for user-centric spaces that fostered “self-fulfillment” while critiquing modernism’s dehumanizing tendencies. 

“He didn’t approach architecture like most architects,” Mr. Reich recalled. “For him, it was about reimagining space, community, the environment and the social and political currents shaping our lives. It was a complete rethinking of how we lived.” 

In 1969, following the violent clash between police and protesters at People’s Park, Mr. Van der Ryn emerged as a vocal supporter of the park’s defenders, mediating between students and the administration. Disillusioned by the university’s response and the rigidity of academia, he distanced himself from institutional structures, later reflecting in his 2005 memoir, “Design for Life,” that “The People’s Park experience had opened my eyes to the hollowness of conventional institutional forms and their authority. It was time to experiment, to take some risks.” 

At the same time, as the Whole Earth Catalog offered a vision for a new social order defined by irreverence toward institutions and a spirit of self-directed learning, Mr. Van der Ryn sought a return to nature. He moved with his wife, Mimi Wolfe, and three young children to a secluded five-acre plot at the end of a steep road on the Inverness Ridge. There, among bishop pines and redwoods, he explored sustainable living firsthand, testing ideas that would later define his career.

In the fall of 1971, that land became the setting for a now-legendary semester-long course, “Making a Place in the Country.” Alongside his teaching assistant and longtime collaborator, Jim Campe, he led 15 Berkeley students into the woods of West Marin to become “outlaw builders.” The course was an experiment in radical self-sufficiency, with students constructing their own shelters from salvaged materials. They eschewed conventional institutions in favor of the individual empowerment achieved through the acquisition of skills. 

“We grew under the sky rather than under a ceiling,” read a zine published by the class, called “Outlaw Building News.” “We worked to the sounds of nature, rather than the hum of fluorescent light.”

The temporary commune cooked, played, slept and worked together. They scavenged building materials from across the region, hauling driftwood from Limantour Beach and dismantling old chicken coops in Petaluma. On Mr. Van der Ryn’s land, they erected shelters, an outhouse, a communal kitchen and a meeting space they dubbed “The Ark.”

One student, Paul Korhummel, built a treehouse that he was reluctant to leave. 

“Sim wasn’t like most architects, who can be dictators,” he said. “He taught us how to collaborate and to see architecture as a way to engage with both the ecological and social dimensions of a site.” 

Mr. Korhummel, who later became an architect himself, remained in Inverness, drawn by the sense of place he discovered during his semester there.

The spirit of the course was reflected in the playful, self-drawn diploma: while Mr. Campe was known as “Logistica Maximus,” Mr. Van der Ryn was crowned “Neotoma fuscipes Rex”—the King Woodrat—a nod to his knack for gathering materials and ideas. 

“We had very few plans, we had very few permits, and we were known as outlaw builders,” said Mr. Campe, who has worked as an architect in Inverness since 1971. Yet Mr. Van der Ryn’s later role as California’s state architect enabled him to legitimize many of the experimental practices pioneered in those woods. 

“Sim could operate within the system while still making radical change,” Mr. Campe said. “There aren’t many who can wear both the suit and the counterculture badge, but Sim was that bridge.”

Known affectionately as the “Trash Boy Scout” for his resourcefulness, Mr. Van der Ryn was a champion of the back-to-the-land movement. He co-founded the Farallones Institute, an experimental research center focused on sustainable architecture and energy-saving technologies. The institute became a crucible for emerging thinkers like Peter Calthorpe, now recognized as one of America’s foremost urban planners and a founder of New Urbanism, which emphasizes mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.

 “Sim’s work went far beyond architecture,” Mr. Calthorpe said. “Back in the late ’60s and ’70s, he defined the concept of sustainable communities and development. At Farallones, you had a whole group of people living and working together in this self-sustaining community—we grew our own food, we built our own buildings, we recycled water and generated energy with solar. It was the first iteration of all that thinking.”

When we talk about green roofs, reclaimed materials, solar panels, rainwater catchment systems and composting toilets—ideas once deemed utopian but now considered foundational—it’s Mr. Van der Ryn we have to thank. 

“Sim was an ideas person with these eco-utopian schemes,” said Paul Discoe, a Zen Buddhist priest and builder who collaborated with Mr. Van der Ryn on various projects, including a meditation hall and an octagonal Japanese-style guest house at Green Gulch Farm, an outpost of the San Francisco Zen Center. 

At Green Gulch, Mr. Van der Ryn mingled with the other luminary groupies that orbited then-Abbott Richard Baker—figures like astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton, Whole Earth Catalog editor Stuart Brandt and Gov. Jerry Brown. 

In 1975, when Gov. Brown appointed him as state architect, Mr. Van der Ryn scaled his vision to the state level, championing energy-efficient, self-sustaining and regenerative public buildings. The first of these, Sacramento’s Gregory Bateson Building, named for the anthropologist, was the nation’s inaugural large-scale structure designed to save energy. It featured microprocessor-controlled shades, natural ventilation and a night-flush system.

Alongside his high-profile projects, Mr. Van der Ryn also sought to simplify regulations for owner-built rural homes. He advocated for a streamlined building code known as “Class K,” which allows for unconventional construction techniques, including the option to forego flushing toilets. The code was adopted in Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt Counties. He explored these ideas in “The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water,” a book that argued for low-impact waste management solutions.

“He was a rule breaker in every sense—both as an architect and as a person,” said his son Micah Van der Ryn. This made him both an exhilarating and unpredictable father figure, as the lofty ideals that drove him were sometimes at odds with the demands of family life.

 “While he was not exactly a family man in any conventional sense, he did take us along for the ride, exposing us as young children to all kinds of experiences,” said his daughter, Julia Van der Ryn. The Van der Ryn children found themselves at underground raves hosted by the Ant Farm, the experimental artist collective; mingling at parties organized by the Black Panthers in Oakland; and laying sod in People’s Park before the National Guard intervened. 

Visiting Mr. Van der Ryn’s compound, one is struck by the tangible embodiment of his lifelong architectural philosophy—one that imagines building as “part of the process of remembering, putting back together our collective dreams.” 

The three-story main house, built like a pole barn with reclaimed interlocking cedar boards, is filled with artifacts from his years of collecting. Driftwood, dried bullwhip kelp, KLM miniature Dutch houses, kilim rugs, gifts from artist friends—like envelope sketches by Clayton Lewis and a freeform cypress sink and a front door crafted by woodworker J.B. Blunk—adorn the space. So do many of his own watercolors of familiar buildings and landscapes, which were a critical part of his design process. 

The house’s atrium is an eruption of color: vivid oranges, reds and greens offset by a striking blue ceiling painted by Tibetan monks to resemble a sky scattered with cumulus clouds. The door to the living quarters bears an intricate painting of the endless knot, symbolizing samsara, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

Ethan Van der Ryn, Mr. Van der Ryn’s youngest son, recalls a moment before construction began when his father sat the three children down and asked them to describe their dream house. 

“I want it to be a big jungle gym,” Ethan had replied. True to form, his father designed the home around six Douglas fir telephone poles embedded in the ground, one of which had pegs that Ethan would climb to reach his bedroom.  

Mr. Van der Ryn’s style here, as elsewhere, is at once idiosyncratic yet tasteful, vibrantly modern yet deeply attuned to local materials and vernacular forms. It defies conventional building typologies while subtly working within them. Nature is the foreground, and his construction serves as an ephemeral vessel for the lives it contains. As he wrote in a manifesto-like poem in 1987, “the building should tell a story about a place and a people—and be a pathway to understand ourselves within nature.”