A Tribute: Sim, Matts, and David

Last month I had the honor to speak at the 2024 University of Oregon Reynolds Symposium, alongside Symposium founder John Reynolds and RMI’s Victor Olgyay. The symposium theme was the relationship between sustainability and resiliency, and our panel was tasked with charting the arc of sustainability and resiliency from more-or-less the dawn of the green building movement (about 75 years ago) to the present; I was asked to cover the last quarter-century.

The day before that panel I learned of the death of David Goldstein, a former colleague at the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was the first of three such notices; soon after, I learned that both Sim Van der Ryn, one-time California State Architect, and Matts Myhrman, straw-bale construction innovator, had also died the same week.

I knew, admired, and was deeply fond of all three of these green building pioneers. By odd coincidence, each of them is represented (albeit not named) by multiple events in the timeline I assembled for my talk at the Reynolds Symposium. I’m hereby dedicating that talk retrospectively to these three phenomenal people. 

Here is a somewhat longer tribute to them I wrote for BuildingGreen.com.