Product Details
Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition

Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition
By Sim Van der Ryn, Stuart Cowan

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Product Description

Ecological Design is a landmark volume that helped usher in an exciting new era in green design and sustainability planning. Since its initial publication in 1996, the book has been critically important in sparking dialogue and triggering collaboration across spatial scales and design professions in pursuit of buildings, products, and landscapes with radically decreased environmental impacts. This 10th anniversary edition makes the work available to a new generation of practitioners and thinkers concerned with moving our society onto a more sustainable path. Using examples from architecture, industrial ecology, sustainable agriculture, ecological wastewater treatment, and many other fields, Ecological Design provides a framework for integrating human design with living systems. Drawing on complex systems, ecology, and early examples of green building and design, the book challenges us to go further, creating buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes that are truly restorative rather than merely diminishing the rate at which things are getting worse.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #295579 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-03-28
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 256 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sim Van der Ryn is professor emeritus in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and founder and principal of Sim Van der Ryn + Associates, an architectural firm specializing in ecological design.

Stuart Cowan is a general partner with Autopoiesis LLC in Portland, Oregon, which offers design, development, and finance services internationally for large-scale sustainability projects. He recently served as research director at Ecotrust.

Customer Reviews

OK Textbook or Primer4
Worth reading, but it might not make it through my next bookshelf thinning. It has two particularly good points: the 5 principles, and the hilarious wording for the opposite of ecological design. My main complaint applies to many of the books and articles on this subject. I'd like a little less cheerleading, and a little more technical direction. Most of the world probably still needs the cheerleading.

summary of major concepts3
I must admit that I didn't read this book as thoroughly as I thought I would, but part of the reason for that is that the content was not exactly what I expected it to be. I was hoping for more examples and illustrations of ecological designs around the world, whereas this book was more informational.

I breezed through the first part, which was an overview and introduction to ecological design, which as you can imagine, is finding ways for us to live while minimizing our impact on the world around us. I didn't care much for the history lesson, either.

The five principles:

1. Solutions grow from place: understanding the unique environment before building leads to innovative designs that take advantage of local nuances

2. Accounting informs design: just like the economic accounting that businesses undertake, ecological accounting should be done to account for the impact of all aspects of building - from the amount of energy required to obtain and transport materials to the impact of the design on nearby ecosystems

3. Design with nature - just as nature breaks down materials to be used by another organism, so too should our designs mimic natural processes to minimize our impact

4. Everyone is a designer - ideas form out of necessity, so don't look to just traditional sources for inspiration

5. Make nature visible - too often we forget about what all goes into our existence because we don't see it (the pipes that bring us water, the wind blocked by the windows our our buildings, etc.)

The list of references at the end of the book is decent. Overall, the book introduces interesting ideas but perhaps not enough concrete examples (which may not have been the authors' intent)