Integral Urban House
The Integral Urban House was a pioneering 1970s experiment in self-reliant urban homesteading. The house was located at 1516 5th St. in Berkeley, California between 1974 and 1984.
The Sierra Club published a book about the experiment in 1979. Elements of the home included a vegetable garden, chickens, rabbits, a fish pond, beehives, a composting toilet, solar power and more. The founders were California State Architect Sim Van der Ryn and Bill & Helga Olkowski, authors of the City People's Guide to Raising Food, and the project was run by the Farallones Institute, which was also founded by Van der Ryn and Bill and Helga Olkowski. According to cofounder Bill Olkowski, Architectural Digest named among the top houses of the 20th century.
According to one environmental history, "The Olkowskis and staff at the Integral Urban House taught visitors to become ecosystem managers in urban, domestic space by involving them in pest control, food production, and household waste management."
Background and mission
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 to form the Farallones Institute, which was founded as a non-profit research and educational organization focused on studying self-reliant living and developing sustainable environmental practices at an urban scale. 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. Bill and Helga Olkowski proposed to have this house built in an urban setting as they wanted to show that cities could become, in their words, “ecologically stable and healthy places to live”.The project's development was further accelerated by the 1973 oil crisis, when imports of oil from the Middle East slowed considerably. In wake of the crisis, the Farallones Institute envisioned a house that could provide its own food and energy in case gasoline, electricity, and natural gas were ever expected to become scarce and unaffordable. The term “integral urban house” was chosen as the name of the project as the institute wanted to provide a house that integrated biological ideas with architectural ones. In order to conserve building materials, promote recycling habits, and to demonstrate that similar projects could be conducted elsewhere at a lower cost, the project’s founders opted to renovate an existing house instead of building a new house from the ground up. According to one report, "The group secured $110,000 from private foundations and institutes for labor and materials to rehabilitate the run-down urban house and fit it with solar energy and non-polluting sanitation and other systems.
Bill Olkowski wrote in 2011, "About 1974 or so Andy Pollack was a student at Antioch College West in San Francisco where we taught, in addition in the Man and Environment Program at UC Berkeley. He was living at our house at that time and found what later became the Integral Urban House by riding his bicycle around Berkeley searching for a place. He found a house for sale in the industrial sector within a zone where one could hear constantly hear the low steady rumble of the freeway in the background. It was being put up for sale for back taxes." 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, 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.Animals
One of the most notable features of the Integral Urban House was the amount of animals that were kept outside the house, including bees, fish, crawdads, chickens, and rabbits. The beehives, located in the far southwest corner of the backyard, were raised to produce as much as of honey for the house's use, according to Oklowski. The House offered a "bee club" with shared use of a honey extractor and other beekeeping equipment. There was also an observation beehive on the first floor of the house. The beehives were placed above the fish pond so that bees were located away from visitors as much as possible and so that dead worker bees that fell into the pond would feed the fish, which were also raised as a source of food for the house's residents. According to Bill Olkowski, "One of our students designed...an innovative pond with wind-activated aeration producing crayfish on human urine." In order to keep the water in the fishpond from becoming stagnant, a windmill known as the Savonius Rotor was constructed out of recycled oil drums, salvaged lumber, and scrap metal. The windmill activated a mechanical diaphragm pump which pumped stagnant pond water through a felt bag suspended on top of a cut oil drum to filter out large particles. Water entering the drum was filtered once again by a bed of crushed oyster shells before being fed back to the pond through a faucet aerator. The aquaculture species included Sacramento blackfish, rainbow trout, and Pacifasticus crayfish.Chickens were kept near the northeast corner of the house by the front driveway and raised for their eggs and for meat. Rabbits were raised on the shady side of the house next to the chickens, were fed "commercial pellets, garden-grown alfalfa, and discarded produce," and were raised both for their meat and for tanning their pelts to make leather.
Vegetation and crops
The front, side, and back yards of the house had a wide variety of plants and fruit trees so that the house could provide a great deal of its overall food for its residents and for the animals. Alfalfa trees were planted in the front yard next to the front driveway as a source of protein for rabbits that were kept in back of the house. According to Bill Olkowski, this was inspired by wartime practices in the area: "Rabbits are the best survival system as they could eat almost anything growing in the urban area...In WWII rabbit growing was big in the San Francisco Bay area as the climate is amenable to alfalfa...I saw reports of over 10 cuttings per year on earlier alfalfa farms." In order to preserve the soil below the driveway and to prevent any stormwater from picking up pollutants before reaching storm drains, the ground surface in front of the house had a wood-chip driveway in lieu of a conventional asphalt, concrete, or brick driveway. The side yard in front of the main entrance along the south-facing wall grew strawberries, asparagus, artichokes, culinary herbs, and rhubarb for the house's residents, as well as chrysanthemums and comfrey to feed to chickens and rabbits. The backyard of the house had a vegetable garden which provided a majority of the food that was grown at the house. The garden used raised beds to permit good drainage and to allow visitors and residents to easily walk around the garden on pathways. Oscillating overhead sprinklers watered most of the vegetables, but squashes, corn, and tomatoes were watered with a soaker hose. The house's mini-orchard included avocado, fig, quince, lemon, plum, and apple trees. The vegetable garden provided plentiful vegetation; Oklowski claims that in 1975 it was reported that $600 worth of vegetables were produced at the house with little expenses outside of seeds and water.For cooler winter months, a greenhouse was attached to the southwest corner of the house’s ground floor to raise tomatoes and cucumbers. The greenhouse also doubled as a source of solar heating for inside the house, with insulated curtains provided to retain heat on colder winter nights. In addition to the yards surrounding the house and the greenhouse, a "roof-top garden" on the main floor porch overlooking the backyard had containers filled with compost to grow tea mints and salad greens. In order to store the large amounts of vegetables farmed at the house, a cooler room located near the center of the ground floor was used for vegetable storage and egg storage.