Building With Ecology

An interview with Jacob Reiner

Sustainable property developer, architectural designer, and deep ecologist Jacob Reiner's work brings together modular housing, rural land development, food production, and integrated agri-resort projects. Across projects in Japan, North America, and Asia, his focus has remained consistent: designing places where architecture, landscape, agriculture, and community function as parts of the same system.

“The central idea in my work is really quite simple,” Reiner says. “How do we create places that support local food production, connect people with the landscape, and restore some of the social and economic benefits that traditional villages once provided?” His work has ranged from the restoration of traditional Japanese villages near Mount Fuji to ski lodges in the Rockies and agricultural production facilities in Bangladesh.

Where did your interest in ecological design begin?

It began in childhood. " I helped build my first house when I was 3 years old. My dad cut the trees, we helped peel the bark, and I remember the day clearly when we set up the first three poles and I helped wind the rope"

Reiner grew up on 100 acres of remote forest in the eastern Maritime provinces of Canada. When he was three years old, his parents built their first home there: a traditional tipi. There was no conventional infrastructure. Drinking water came from a small bubbling spring. The kitchen consisted of a simple outdoor wooden bench beneath a roof. The nearest electricity or telephone was about five miles away through the woods at a neighbor’s house.

“My earliest memories are really of living directly in the landscape,” he says. “We fished for trout in the river, watched beavers changing the waterways through the forest, and picked wild blueberries every summer.”

Building and farming were also part of daily life. He planted seeds in the family garden and helped his father handle the long poles used to form the tipi structure.

Those experiences became the foundation for his later interest in ecologically balanced approaches to living, building, and land use.

How did you move from that childhood into construction and design?

Around the age of twelve, Reiner began as a carpenters apprentice in his family's upstate New York rural town, working on historic country estates, New England farmhouses and big red barns. "We used to sit in the shade on the front porch of Rupert Murdoch's Old Chatham house and eat our brown bag lunches after we fixing the railings and right before we would grab a few trout out of his pond."

Over the following decade, he gained practical experience across the building trades, from pouring foundations and electrical work to repairing slate roofs. At the same time, he independently studied architectural design and construction engineering. “I came into design through building,” he says. “Before thinking of architecture as an abstract exercise, I understood buildings as things you actually have to construct, repair, heat, maintain, and live in.”

"One summer my father, big John Rilke and I spent two months lifting a huge barn out of a ditch it had dropped into. It was a three story 25-ton big red barn sitting two feet below ground level and leaning like the tower of Pisa. It was just us three guys, a few pullies and rope, and a lot of brains but we lifted the thing up corner by corner, built a foundation under it and got it stable for another hundred years hopefully. The owner was a weekender from Manhatten, made his fortune inventing Trivial Pursuit, pretty sharp guy, but even he was impressed and said it was like watching a clock spin backwards the way we brought the decaying building out of the ground and back to life"

He later attended Cornell University, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources with a minor in environmental education. Summers were still spent on construction sites. His building experience eventually took him to Maui, Hawaii; Whistler, British Columbia; Japan; and other international locations, exposing him to different climates, construction methods, materials, and cultural approaches to architecture.

When did sustainability become a professional focus?

By 2000, Reiner had become convinced that demand existed for sustainable housing, but that most consumers lacked practical ways to access ecological building systems.That led him to establish Earth Embassy, an organization focused on sustainable homes, small-farm technology, agri-resorts, boutique agriculture, and local food businesses. The organization also developed the Earth Embassy Sustainable Living Center near Mount Fuji, hosting international students and postgraduate interns studying organic farming, renewable energy, and product development.

One of its central projects was the Fuji Farm & Solar Café, a working organic farm and restaurant. Reiner also launched the Mt. Fuji Mint Tea Company, using locally grown herbs and forest products. “The idea was not simply to make an ecological building,” he says. “It was to look at the whole local system—housing, agriculture, energy, food, employment, and community.”

What was the next stage of that work in Japan?

In 2006, Reiner founded EDEN Homes in Japan, focusing on rural property development, design-build projects, and the adaptive reuse of traditional buildings.

One of the company’s early projects involved the restoration of a traditional minka village at Lake Shojiko near Mount Fuji. Reiner acquired, restored, and resold historic houses and abandoned structures within the community.

The project brought more than $1.5 million in investment into the remote village and local area while helping preserve traditional architecture. It also received government grants and international media attention, including coverage by the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, and Washington Post.

“For me, preservation only really works when it is economically viable,” Reiner says. “You have to create a reason for buildings, farms, and villages to remain alive rather than simply treating them as museum pieces.”

How did your work expand beyond independent development?

Reiner subsequently worked in consulting, design, development, and project-management roles with international firms including WeWork and Honka Homes.

He has also lectured at and collaborated with institutions including the University of Tokyo, Nippon Veterinary and Life Science University, and Peace Boat.

These roles broadened his work from individual buildings and rural development into larger questions of construction management, prefabrication, real estate development, and scalable environmental systems.

Where does ATOM fit into that progression?

As lead designer for ATOM, Reiner began developing modular platforms for both housing and agriculture. ATOMHOUSE focuses on prefabricated housing systems designed for efficient manufacture and deployment in different markets and environments. ATOMFARM applies a similar modular approach to agriculture, including controlled-environment food production, mushroom cultivation, and systems for crops such as strawberries and wasabi.

“The connection between the house and the farm has always been important to me,” Reiner says. “Housing is one system. Food production is another. Manufacturing is another. But at the community level, they can be designed together.”

ATOM has received multiple research and development grants related to low-energy heating and cooling technologies, including systems using Stirling engine technology. The group has also worked internationally, including on a government-supported mushroom production facility in Bangladesh.

What connects these different projects?

Although the projects vary greatly in scale and location, Reiner sees them as part of the same body of work. A restored Japanese farmhouse, a modular house, a greenhouse, an agricultural processing facility, and an agri-resort may appear to be very different building types. For Reiner, however, they are all components of a larger question: how communities can provide housing, food, energy, employment, and social connection while maintaining a closer relationship with the natural systems around them.

“My interest has never really been architecture by itself,” he says. “It is the relationship between buildings, land, food, technology, and the people who live there.”

That relationship continues to define his work in modular architecture, integrated agriculture, property development, and sustainable community systems.

What are you working on now?

Having lived and worked in Japan while moving between different cultures, construction standards, building methods, and development models, Reiner’s work has continued to evolve with changing materials, technologies, and even financing paradigms.

“Right now we’re expanding the modular systems and home manufacturing side, while at the same time developing more of our own properties and small communities,” he says. “For me, it’s really about scale and community. If you want to make a meaningful change, a single building is not always enough.”

By acquiring land, partnering with landowners, and developing multiple homes together, Reiner sees an opportunity to create the critical mass and economies of scale needed to make more integrated systems practical. “When houses are connected into neighborhoods or resort developments, they can begin to function more like a living entity—capable of producing some of their own food, water and energy, and supporting things like education, health, local business, and community services.”

That idea of the village has become increasingly central to his work. “We’re really trying to build the idea of a village into every project, whether it’s high-rise apartments, affordable rural housing, or a luxury resort.”

In Japan, Reiner sees particular opportunity in underused golf courses, ski areas, and rural resorts, where existing land and infrastructure can often be adapted rather than abandoned.

“Resort development can become much more than second homes,” he says. “If you bring in new property owners and new investment, you can also support local agriculture, small businesses, worker housing, food production, and services that benefit the wider community.”

For Reiner, the model is deliberately scalable. The architecture may change from one place to another, but the objective remains the same: to create developments that operate less as isolated buildings and more as connected, productive communities.