Integral Urban House

In 1972 Sim Van der Ryn, Bill & Helga Olkowski, and other architects, engineers, and biologists in the San Francisco Bay Area held a series of meetings at restaurants ("usually Chinese") Shortly after its founding, the Farallones Institute proceeded with a project to create a house that would be capable of combining, or “integrating”, principles of energy conservation, water conservation, urban agriculture, domestic waste recycling, solar energy collection, home composting, and in-house food growth to create a self-sufficient demonstration house to showcase their ideas to the public. According to the Berkeley Revolution, a digital archive of the area's transformation in the late 1960s & 1970s, the Farallones institute purchased a run-down Victorian home in October 1974 in the neighborhood of West Berkeley for less than $10,000 (not adjusted for inflation), with renovation beginning shortly afterwards. By June 1975, the Integral Urban House became open to the public for classes and tours, despite renovations not yet being completed. Other key personnel involved in the project that were credited by Van der Ryn in the introduction to the book published by the Sierra Club included Jim Campe, Jeff Poetsch, and Sheldon Leon, who were responsible for much of the house’s construction, Tom Javits, the resident manager of the house, and Harlow Daugherty, who provided the original grant to begin the project. Similar projects of the 1970s included Eco-house in London and Project Ouroboros in St. Paul, Minnesota. ==Layout==

The Integral Urban House was located on a by lot at 1516 5th St in Berkeley and consisted of two floors which were referred to as the ground floor and the main floor. The front of the house and the driveway faced east while the main entrance of the house was located on the south-facing wall of the ground floor. The ground floor consisted of two bedrooms, a project office, a reception area with displays of the house's features for visitors to see, a composting tank for tanks for composting human waste and kitchen waste, a tank for greywater collection, a shop room, a greenhouse, and demonstration areas for visitors to see how beekeeping and aquaculture were conducted at the house. The ground floor also had an area to store vegetables and other crops grown at the house as well as an area to dry rabbit hides that were saved to make leather after rabbits in the backyard were consumed for their meat. The main floor, which was accessible by stairs located near the ground floor entrance, featured a third bedroom, a seminar/office room, a library, a kitchen with a wood gas stove, pantry, and "cold box", a dining area, and the house’s only bathroom, which contained a waterless composting toilet located above the tank on the ground floor. The main floor also had a balcony above the front driveway looking east and a porch with a solar oven and container garden overlooking the backyard in the west. ==Features==

Helga Olkowski wrote The Self-Guided Tour to the Integral Urban House of the Farallones Institute, Berkeley, California, which was published by the Farallones Institute in 1976. The guide outlines the many unique features of the house which are listed below. solar-heated hot water system, located on the sloped roof of the main floor on top of the main ground floor entrance. Solar collection panels were placed facing south to capture radiation and heat the hot water used in the house. A tank, which was fed from its bottom from the city's cold water supply, was located in the attic and held all of the water for the house. In order to heat this water, cold water was naturally fed downwards to the base of the solar collector. The water entered the copper piping under the solar collector, picking up heat and naturally rising to the top of the attic storage tank. This process is referred to by Olkowski as a “thermo siphon”. When hot water is desired, the heated water is drawn off from the top of the tank first and automatically mixed with cold water to ensure that temperatures are not too hot for dishwashing or shower use. The solar collector cost about $1,200 to build. For excessive overcast or foggy periods, the house had a electric water heater as a backup, but this was not often needed; data collected for 1975 stated that this only provided five percent of the hot water needed for that year. ==Daily use==

The Integral Urban House offered many classes to the public on various topics related to ecological housing, such as solar energy systems, food stock raising, and beekeeping. It also provided training programs, seminars on environmental education, and consultation for others who were looking to make similar modifications to their homes. As a demonstration house available for the public to view, the house proved to be quite popular in its early years – resident manager Tom Javits states in the introduction to the guide written by Oklowski that each week about 500 people visited the house, with 45-minute tours being conducted between 1:00pm and 5:00pm on Saturdays and at 1:00 pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for large groups in excess of five people. Circa 1976, the regular tour guides were Charles O'Loughlin, Tanya Drlik, and Tom Javits. In the first three years that the house was being renovated, eight other homes in the neighborhood were renovated and occupied as the project gained interest in the local area. The house was typically occupied by a handful of students from the University of California, Berkeley, employed as interns, who would be responsible for maintaining the house’s systems and documenting successes, failures, and challenges. According to a U.S. government book published in 1980 for consumers struggling with inflation, "Until all systems were functional the monthly expense of operating the house was $2,000. But by the end of 1979 electricity, gas and water bills for the seven-bedroom house averaged an incredibly low $30 a month." ==Rise and decline in popularity==

In order to spread their ideas, members of the Farallones Institute, including der Ryn and the Olkowskis, wrote a guide that was published by the Sierra Club in 1979 which provided methodologies, design strategies, and other information for its readers to study when considering building similar houses of their own. The book contains chapters devoted to energy conservation, water conservation, waste management, using solar energy, raising plants and animals, and combining these features together. In addition to difficulty in finding the necessary labor to maintain the house, the neighborhood around the house began to experience widespread gentrification by the early 1980s. Sabrina Richard from the group Critical Sustainabilities, a collection of students promoting sustainable practices in the Bay Area, states that a nearby luxury-shopping destination was constructed and the area increased greatly both in population and in land value. ==End of the Integral Urban House==

By 1984, the Integral Urban House project was permanently suspended, as its creators admitted that it had failed to gain more public support. By the time of its closure, the Integral Urban House was unable to generate sufficient funds from tours and classes. As of 2017, the house has since been converted back to a standard residential home. Despite being transformed into a normal residence, the Integral Urban House still retains much of its exterior appearance from the 1970s. ==Book==

Bill Olkowski stated of the book, "The first edition was erroneously published as if Sim van der Ryn was the primary author and designer, but he was not. Subsequent editions correctly identify Helga and me as primary authors." Olkowski also stated about the book-editing process: The report People power: what communities are doing to counter inflation (1980) recommended it as "a resource guide for the city dweller who wants to develop an economic self-sustaining lifestyle." ==References==