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 ("usually Chinese") 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 [to teaching] 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 (actually a bidding process) 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 (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 125 ft (38 m) by 60 ft (18 m) .125-acre (5,400 ft2; 510 m2) 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.
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