Hyatt Regency skywalks designer Bob Berkebile is the godfather of green building

An early environmental activist, Fuller preached the value of resource conservation and was best-known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. Nearly half a century since he was under Fuller's tutelage, it's hard to spend an hour with Berkebile without some reference to "Bucky."

"From his point of view, we are cutting butter with a chain saw," Berkebile recalls of Fuller. "And that sort of vulgar, overmuscled, polluting approach emerged out of Western scientific thought. He thought that was a bad course."

That influence set Berkebile on a different course himself, as both an architect and an environmentalist.

"But first, I unfortunately had a little detour to Vietnam," he says. Berkebile was planning for graduate school when he got his draft notice. He was stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean that became a flagship during the Vietnam War.

When he completed his service requirement, he married Libby Pottle — a fellow Kansas Citian he'd met through friends while the two were in college. An outdoorswoman herself, she was excited about settling down in San Francisco, a coastal city close to mountains. But the environmental couple returned to Missouri because Berkebile could get licensed far sooner in his home state.

That proved to be the right decision. Berkebile was hired by the respected Kansas City architecture firm Kivett and Myers. When he was 28, his design was selected in 1965 as the template for the new Kansas City International Airport. A few years later, he was on a flight returning from Munich, Germany — another airport project he was tapped to help design — when he and a colleague, Bruce Patty, decided to strike out on their own.

Their firm, Patty Berkebile Nelson Architects, opened shop in 1970, the same year President Richard Nixon enacted a sweeping array of environmental laws. Berkebile celebrated by hanging an Earth Day flag — fashioned from green felt pulled from his in-laws' old poker table — in his new office window.

The firm made a name for itself in preservation architecture, winning contracts to redevelop an old post office in St. Louis, a courthouse in St. Joseph and a performing-arts center in downtown Kansas City. "The Folly Theater was the world's largest pigeon hotel for a number of years, and now it's a poster child for the National Trust," Berkebile says.

Then the firm secured work on a project that promised to vault them to even greater national status — the $50 million, 40-story Hyatt Regency Hotel at Crown Center. Berkebile and another local architect, Herb Duncan, were the two principals on the project. Berkebile led the design work, which envisioned a set of four airy walkways with glass railings. The 120-foot-long "sky bridges" would cross the glass atrium like the center of an architectural "H," connecting the restaurants and conferences halls on the south side of the hotel to the rooms on the north side. It was Berkebile's signature across the seal on the envelope approving the final schematics for the skywalks. It was his name that was indicted in newspaper articles in the days after the collapse.

His guilt about his role as an architect drove him to delve into the environmental ethics of his industry. He went back through his firm's past projects. He learned more about the materials used and where they came from. He decided that designs were either restorative or destructive; there was no middle ground.

Nelson, Berkebile's longtime partner, says Berkebile's environmental research was nearly all-encompassing. "For several years, he had an almost total concentration on the environmental side, and that didn't do anything for the bottom line," Nelson says. "And there was some tension, some 'Bob, you've got to back off a little bit. The rest of us are carrying the architectural load.'"