Architect Designs for Conservation

In 30 years as an environmental architect, Cal Poly Pomona professor John T. Lyle has helped the Brazilian government preserve coastal forests, saved wetlands in Northern Italy and lectured on environmental planning at the prestigious Kyushi Institute of Design in Japan.

But Lyle has also practiced what he preaches closer to home. He built a solar-heated, breeze-cooled architect’s studio behind his Sierra Madre canyon home. And he has designed a handful of homes on the West Coast with similar attributes, including one for a Riverside client that is a case study in environmental design.

Lyle’s theory--that buildings should integrate harmoniously with nature and the surrounding landscape, instead of lording over it--has long been a quixotic one in a nation whose builders regularly slice tops of ridges, cut down trees and erect boxy structures without a thought to natural light or water conservation.

But today, as the Middle East crisis spurs an already strong interest in alternative energy and conservation, the soft-spoken Lyle believes that the tenets he has preached for decades are finally coming into their own.

“There are cycles in these things,” says the 56-year-old Lyle. “People are getting more and more interested in how architecture fits in with the natural landscape.”

The result has been a surge of interest in Cal Poly’s department of landscape architecture, where applications have jumped fourfold in the past five years. Currently, the school has 294 undergraduate students and 35 graduate students.

And Lyle, who headed the department for many years and wrote “Designing for Human Ecosystems,” a textbook that is required reading in environmental design classes throughout the country, has seen former students enter the work force and apply his principles throughout Southern California.

“He changed my whole way of looking at the profession,” says Julie Riley, a landscape architect with the Los Angeles’ Department of Parks and Recreation who heads a water conservation effort in city parks. Riley is experimenting with turf grass that requires less watering, and new methods of irrigation. She says that many of her ideas first percolated in Lyle’s classes.

“He told us we shouldn’t just be exterior decorators, we should be aware of how what we do affects the environment as a functioning living landscape, not just a decorative, pretty one,” Riley says.

A stroll through Lyle’s garden--which won a national design award from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1986--illustrates how the Cal Poly professor has put his ideas into practical use.

Walking into the terraced back yard, one hears the steady drip, drip of water into a stone pond. Floating on the pond’s top are water lilies that Lyle grew to minimize evaporation.

A recirculating pump keeps the water fresh. And swimming in the pond are fat golden koi and bluegill.

Lyle originally hoped to raise and fatten the latter fish for family dinners with his wife and two children, Cybele, 17, and Alex, 21. But that plan was scrapped when his children protested.

“The kids didn’t want to eat their pets,” he says with rueful resignation.

With the exception of a few fruit trees and a vegetable garden, most of the plants in Lyle’s back yard require little watering. There are huge bushes of fragrant rosemary, rockrose and a ground cover of drought-resistant arctotheca to cover the hillsides.

“It’s a very good substitute for grass or ivy,” says Lyle, who rails against gardens that are “artificially supported by chemicals and imported water.”

His home, built in 1949 by Southern California modernist architect Harwell Harris, abuts the majestic San Gabriel Mountains. It blends elements of Greene & Greene and California Craftsman architectural style, with several walls made of clear glass that showcase the stunning view. Lyle and his family moved into the home in 1982.

On the way to Lyle’s studio, one passes neatly painted white beehives that supply honey for his family. The studio itself echoes the architectural motifs of the house, down to its bluish-gray slatted wood exterior to the overhung eaves and outdoor terrace.

But there are some differences: the studio’s facing is made of cedar; the house of pine. Harwell “had to use pine,” Lyle says. “It was the only building material he could get in 1949, after the war.”

The home also uses traditional fossil fuels for heating, reflecting the mood of the late 1940s when America, tired of years of conserving and flush with victory in World War II, dove gleefully into massive consumption.

In contrast, the studio built in 1986 includes a passive solar heating system that looks like a large terrarium. Two-story glass windows collect the sunlight that streams in. A layer of gravel inside the windows traps the heat, which rises and disperses through the book-lined study upstairs by means of a slatted wood ceiling, which lets the warm air circulate.

During summer, the studio is cooled by canyon breezes that blow in through the windows, which face north and south.

Although the studio was a modest project, Lyle has also designed several homes for private clients that incorporate his environmental concerns.

One of his favorites went up 10 years ago in Riverside County. Solar heated, cooled by the winds, built partially into a hillside and planted with indigenous flora that provide shade in summer and require little water, the home is energy efficient and iconoclastic.

“It’s very heartening that there are people in positions of such influence in the educational world,” says Julia Russell, founder of an environmental clearinghouse called Eco-Home. Ten years ago, Russell turned her modest Los Feliz bungalow into an ecologically sound home and in the process launched a cottage industry that publishes educational materials on how others can make such changes.

Gregory Vail, a former Lyle student who runs the Irvine land planning firm Vail, Speck, Taylor, calls the Cal Poly professor his “philosophical mentor.”

“He really inspired me,” Vail says. “The things he was espousing were things I had a vague concept of, and he helped me crystallize them.”

Vail has had ample opportunity these days to try out his ideas. Recently, he completed a wetlands restoration project for Del Mar and is working on a joint development-restoration project for Bolsa Chica, a 1,600-acre coastal property near Huntington Beach.

“Within the last two years, particularly with the emerging environmental consciousness, there’s been a tremendous interest and enormous interest in the ideas that John had,” Vail said.

Planners and architects involved in environmental preservation say they hope the trend will continue.

“People living in cities have lost contact with nature and how it relates to their lives,” says Lyle. “We can design environments that fit with nature, but people need to know that this type of design exists. And then maybe they’ll demand it, and builders will be forced to provide it.”