Johan van Lengen was born in the Netherlands, studied architecture in Canada, and received his architectural degree in 1960 from the University of Oregon. In the early '70s, largely influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog, he abandoned a successful career as an architect in San Francisco to work on providing better housing for the disadvantaged in Latin America. He moved to Brazil, where he and his wife, Rose, founded TIBA (Bio-Architecture and Intuitive Technology), an institute for alternative building technology in the Mata Atlantica, the eastern coastal jungle of Brazil. At the same time, the van Lengen family started converting abandoned grasslands into tropical forest.

Johan has also worked for the United Nations and a number of government agencies in Latin America. At TIBA, he continues to develop new ideas in construction technology and ways to transfer this knowledge to the self-help builders in his workshops.