Ralph Knowles

Daylight isn’t the first urban-planning consideration, but it is among the most important. This pioneer in solar design has worked for half a century to spread the message.

- Mimi Zeiger

I meet architect and educator Ralph Knowles on an unseasonably warm autumn day, even for Southern California. He greets me in shirtsleeves (his shirt is a tropical pattern of vines and branches) and leads me to a seat on the balcony of his condo. The building—a retirement community—is fairly new, but mature oak trees line the quiet street. As we talk about his career, the California oaks form a poignant backdrop. For more than five decades, Knowles, 88, has argued for an architecture that hews closely to nature’s forces and rhythms.

Throughout the bruising 2016 election, climate change and the ecological impact of our insatiable demand for energy were the policy questions that were always on the sidelines and never explicitly addressed. Similarly, architects have often evaded these issues—embracing sustainability and LEED requirements as necessary, but rarely tackling them head-on. This uneasy relationship between energy and architecture dates back decades. Knowles published his first book in 1974, just when the global economy was in the throes of an energy crisis. Petroleum and heating oil were in short supply, leading to not only the famous gas lines but also the political tensions between the United States and Middle Eastern nations that we still see today.

The text of Energy and Form: An Ecological Approach to Urban Growth was part energy conservation treatise and part call to action. Drawing on studies of pueblo architecture and analysis of California’s Owens Valley watershed, Knowles proposed a systematic method of shaping architecture and urban development in response to seasonal and climatic rhythms. In the book’s introduction, he writes that “its method is deduction and rests on the premise that human survival depends on our willingness to consciously direct urban growth.”