Rod grew up in the Village of Bright for 18 years. An ambitious lad, he set out to be an astronaut, studying engineering at the University of Toronto. Yet today, Rod designs and builds EcoVillages in Ithaca, New York. How did he get here? His is an interesting story.
The youngest of three boys, the first in his family to go to university, he put himself through the university by working in construction. “Much was expected of me,” he says. “But there was no one to steer me.” Halfway through, he realized he should be studying architecture.
Discovering his true calling midway, he says, was “like swimming back from the middle of a lake.”
At this time, he was living in a world-famous building known as Rochdale College, which began as an inspired open-door college for those seeking self-education—without tuition or professors or policing.
Looking back, Rod thinks that it was a stimulating time. But Rochdale degenerated into chaos and self-destructed. Fortunately for Lambert, things did not fall apart for him. The Village of Bright had given him his indelible aesthetic appeal as a builder. He bought 100 acres of land, built himself an off-grid house, and lived off the land, needing only $2,000 per year.
While there, Rod says he found his first mentor, William Caldwell, himself a self-taught architect, engaged in building high-end commercial projects. “Caldwell was primarily a painter, whose paintings, like Goya’s, showed man’s inhumanity to man. Caldwell represented these on the psychic level, Goya on the physical. He taught me to search for good design in architecture,” Rod said.
Rod’s mother-in-law gave him a book by a teacher and instructor at the Springwater Zen Center South of Rochester. Lambert says, “Reading Toni Packer’s book, I became a Buddhist. It suited me better than the Old Testament God of fire and brimstone.
Later, I was chosen in a competition over another architect to design the Springwater Zen Center.”
Recounting conflicts during the first phase of his work at the EcoVillage in Ithaca, Rod says, “A different drummer is often seen as a noise maker. I had difficulty in establishing my keep-it-simple design skills due to personalities (including my own!), politics, and power structures.”
Since graduating, Rod had been designing and trying to recreate the Village of Bright. A person’s first landscape has the greatest impact on creativity. Rod is no exception. In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth explains how an earlier landscape becomes one’s mentor and muse.
“Our farm lay on the edge of the village,” Rod says. “On one side was a clover field, and on the other, playmates. The village had its own school. I could walk home for lunch. The village had a hotel, a train station, its own cobbler, barber, two churches, and supply store.”
“Perhaps my very rural, self-reliant sensibilities are not highly compatible with the very urban ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ sensibilities here.”
“I was able to establish a very different approach to getting communities built in a much more organic, personally invested way, with allowance for personal sweat-equity and personal touches evident in the strawbale homes in the second neighborhood, called SONG at EcoVillage,” said Rod.
“While some contend that it cost more than they expected, almost everyone got good value. I have used this affordable approach with great success in the new White Hawk EcoVillage starting in Danby, for which I did the initial site design and home design.”
Rod has come home, raising his family in a place as like Bright as possible.
