A childhood spent surfing and swimming in Southern California showed David Hertz nature's power as well as its fragility. "I saw it go from a fairly pristine, natural place," says the architect, who hasn't entirely lost his surfer's drawl, of the Santa Monica Bay, "into, basically, a cesspool."

Hertz was green before green was cool. Early in his career, he came up with Syndecrete, a lightweight surfacing material of ash and cement that at times has incorporated golf tees, computer parts, and eyeglass frames. "I've been very interested," he said over dinner recently in Venice, where he lives not far from the ocean, "in what we take, make, and waste." His new office in Santa Monica is way beyond solar panels, though it's got those, too: The roof is covered in plants that feast on the rich bounty of carbon dioxide coming off the 10 freeway. One of the walls is made of tile samples, used milk jugs, old LPs, and even his own wisdom teeth. Hertz, in other words, is an idealist at home in a broken world. And he got there, the fit 46-year-old says, by "not really being easily told what to do."

Hertz's general style is a cleanly organic take on California modernism. One of his best-known projects was radically greening up Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Montecito house, and he's been at work designing a place for surfer Kelly Slater in Hawaii. His own McKinley House, where he lives with his wife and three kids—a Balinese-style affair he built with reclaimed wood and Syndecrete—has already risen to icon status. His latest act of daring sets a new benchmark in sustainable architecture: He's nearing completion on the 747 Wing House project, a 55-acre, multi-structure compound just north of Malibu incorporating various parts of a Tower Air 747 he found slowly decomposing in the California desert. "It represents," Hertz says of the mammoth aircraft, "the most judicious use of resources to achieve the lightest structure with the highest strength. And it hits the ground at only eight square feet." He was amazed that one could be had for about $30,000. (They go for about $200 million new.)

Hertz's client Francie Rehwald chose him after checking out a dozen architects. On a visit to the McKinley House, she was impressed with "the way he walks his talk." The Wing House doesn't seem so jarring when looking over Hertz's career: He didn't need Al Gore to tell him about the importance of being green. "As a surfer you're involved with understanding weather patterns on a global scale," he says. The son of a surgeon father and a poet-photographer mother, Hertz was always interested in fitting art and science together, and architecture, he realized as a kid, was the way to do it.

While attending L.A.'s Southern California Institute of Architecture during the energy crisis of the late seventies, Hertz began to get a sense of how dangerous what he calls the "cowboy economy"—shortsighted and built on a selfish excuse for individualism—can be. In those days, he apprenticed with the legendary John Lautner, best known for the hillside flying-saucer-shaped Chemosphere House in Hollywood (now owned by publisher Benedikt Taschen). "From Lautner," Hertz says, "I learned to put up a good fight, to not take no for an answer." After picking up his degree from SCI-ARC in 1983, he worked for Frank Gehry, who was then still an architectural outsider, as he recalls, "into fish and snakes and scales."

In 2005, Rehwald, the heiress of a line of Mercedes-Benz dealers, asked Hertz to design a series of graceful and feminine buildings for her mountain retreat. "My only concern," she says, "was that his style is very angular, very masculine." A few weeks later, on a family vacation to Scotland, while sitting groggy and jet-lagged in a hotel room, Hertz realized that the airplane wings he'd been seeing around him matched the sinuous images in his mind. "They were unmistakably feminine," he says, "curvilinear, light, soft."

"You don't think of an airplane as being very feminine," says Rehwald, who, when Hertz told her of his brainstorm, suggested the two find a plane. They drove out to an aviation boneyard and discovered a 747. "Once you get under the wing of a plane," she says, "your eye comes to appreciate the curves. They seem sculptural." Hertz liked the poetic implications of using a 747: It was aerospace, after all, that made California's economy during its most rapid period of growth, provided Howard Hughes with his most erotic dreams, and gave the nation some of its headlong sense of confidence. The jet's wings—all 5,500 square feet of them, with working ailerons to help with airflow—will become the roof of the main living space, with its sweeping ocean views. But nearly every part of the craft will be used, with sections of the upper fuselage becoming a guesthouse, sleeping loft, and art studio, and the nose cone forming a meditation chamber on the grounds of the estate.

"The idea is to try to consume the airplane like an American Indian would consume a buffalo," Hertz says of this high-flying repurposing act. "We bought the thing; it would be a shame to see it go to waste."—SCOTT TIMBERG

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