Natural habitat: Anni Tilt and David Arkin design houses to suit their clients and save the planet

Residential Architect, March, 2005 by Cheryl Weber

David Arkin and Anni Tilt, husband-and-wife architects in Berkeley, Calif., live with their two children in a refurbished 1910 farmhouse outfitted with solar panels and a wind turbine. They walk or bike the five blocks to their solar-powered office, a new building beside a creek. It's located three blocks from their son's school and 60 feet from the home plate where he plays baseball. A red electric Beetle is plugged in at the house, charged up for trips into San Francisco. Arkin and Tilt didn't grow up in this progressive university town, which welcomes dedicated environmentalists, but they met here during graduate school at the University of California and then stayed to perfect a certain kind of architecture: clean, lyrical buildings that assimilate resource-efficiency into everyday life. Since co-founding the firm in 1997, the two have produced passive solar houses made out of straw bales, rammed earth mixed with quarry waste, and recycled and salvaged materials, and garnered nearly 20 design awards in the process.

Clients seem to like Arkin and Tilt because they do the job of architects, creating handsome elevations and bright, airy interiors that flow. The houses reach out to the landscape, and the landscape reaches into the houses. But clients soon discover the other unexpected perks of buildings designed to live lean. A great deal of time is spent studying the sun's seasonal angles, capturing or controlling it with clerestories and tilted roof planes. Open floor plans enhance the sensation of light in the round, and salvaged materials add vintage flair to pristine surfaces. With their straightforward gestures and careful response to the site, the firm's buildings mix modern and vernacular forms. But unlike the thin veil between inside and out that characterizes Modernist dwellings, the thick earthen walls of some of Arkin Tilt's homes provide a cozy enclosure that breathes, maintaining comfortable temperatures with minimal need for mechanical heating and cooling. The firm's work isn't just about bringing the outdoors in, it's about the way clients feel when they're inside.

With a mostly residential practice balanced by commissions for eco-resorts, park buildings, and religious facilities, Tilt and Arkin are helping to work out the green building movement's growing pains. "When we founded this thing eight years ago, we decided we were going to wear our environmentalism on our sleeves rather than making it something we did on the sly," Arkin says. Tilt adds, "We try to make sure our clients feel passionate about both ecology and good design, because we do. It makes for much stronger relationships."

green light

Arkin, AIA, grew up in rural Wisconsin and spent summers during high school and college as a camp counselor, living in a tent. "I think that cemented my relationship with the natural environment," he says. "One of the things we're always striving to be within any building is outside." After finishing a five-year bachelor of architecture program at the University of Minnesota, Arkin worked for Obie Bowman at Sea Ranch, Calif., for two years. In 1991, he enrolled in UC Berkeley's joint master's degree program in architecture and planning. There he befriended professor Sim Van der Ryn, a visionary pioneer in green building and a former California State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown, and worked with him on several planning projects.

Following a brief stint during grad school with the architecture and planning firm Calthorpe Associates, Arkin approached Van der Ryn in search of a job. Van der Ryn put him to work for the next four years doing ecological design and analysis. One project in particular planted him firmly on the path to sustainable design. He was appointed project architect for the Real Goods Solar Living Center, one of the world's largest suppliers of solar technology and now the home of the Solar Living Institute in Hopland, Calif. "In many ways, that rekindled my love of architecture and building," Arkin says. "At the time, the showroom was the world's largest straw bale building at 5,000 square feet. It completely heats and cools itself, and all the electricity is generated on site. To this day, that's one of our goals for all of our projects."

Although solar panels and other technological interventions crop up on many of the firm's commissions, its focus is on natural materials and building systems, recycled content, and salvaged resources. The two share a compatible design philosophy, and their talents intertwine. David's strengths run to what the buildings are made of and how they're spanned structurally, while Tilt pays attention to the sense of space and light. Her undergraduate degree in civil engineering and their combined experience teaching structures classes at UC Berkeley underpin the firm's willingness to venture into uncharted territory. "When we're working with straw bale, or any systems that are not conventional, it's about not being afraid but thinking about how it's working on all these different levels," Tilt says. "When you make some attempt to understand new ways of building, you're more open to the possibility of alternative solutions."