What was going on when I was born?

A new generation of energy-efficient buildings is beginning to appear across the nation. Highly eclectic in form, the new buildings exploit environmental elements such as terrain and climate, and mix advanced technologies with basic engineering strategies to conserve energy. The first reaction to rising energy costs in the aftermath of the 1973 oil boycott was to retrofit the pre-boycott energy guzzlers or modify buildings under construction to include computer-controlled energy systems. However, builders were reluctant to try radical solutions. Now their attitude appears to be changing. Most new buildings designed and begun in the late 1970's, when it was clear that the era of cheap, abundant energy was over, were designed with energy savings in mind. Some innovative architects, engineers and owners have made a major commitment to energy conservation.

A Harvard Business School student, an Argentinian corporate executive, a French architect, a doughnut-shop worker from Secaucus, N.J., a nurse from Kentucky, a builder, a banker, a tattooed electrician, an inventor, a doctor, and a reporter were among 600 people who went on vacation together. For a week, they had no contact at all with the world outside. No clocks and no news. No cars and no money, no telephones and no obligations. They were virtually forced to get to know one another. That most - to a different degree and in a different way - could have a good time is why, I suppose, Club Med has proved so successful. It is not an easy thing to define, when you consider the unlikely mix of people that I (the reporter) found at Buccaneer's Creek in Martinique on a recent visit. But beautiful beaches, copious food, lots of sports and entertainment, and an atmosphere designed to make friends of strangers are undoubtedly some of the major reasons.

Some of the Yankees have said all along that a hitting slump is like a cold, and with or without medication it eventually goes away. Last night, as predicted, the Yankees were breathing more freely after a 7-5 victory over the Seattle Mariners at Yankee Stadium. Against a stubborn Mariner team that rebounded from a four-run first-inning deficit and executed four double plays, the Yankee batters accumulated nine hits, three by Bobby Murcer, the designated hitter. On Wednesday, against the Oakland A's, the Yankees had 13 hits and nine runs, their best offense since opening day.

The San Francisco Department of City Planning has decided to require developers of new commercial and industrial buildings to offset the impact of their developments by building residential housing. ''It is the price of getting their development,'' said George Williams of the planning department. Using its power of environmental review, the department has been requiring developers to agree to the building of residential units as a condition for a permit to build in downtown San Francisco. So far, few developers have balked at the policy. ''To fight it would mean tremendous delay and cost,'' said Richard Morton of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. ''So we've rolled over and played dead.''

Don't Weep for Germany For the first time since he came to power, the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, comes to Washington this week in the garb of a beleaguered politician presiding over an ailing economy. Last Sunday's political events seem to have shaken the Chancellor - his Social Democratic Party lost in West Berlin and Valery Giscard D'Estaing, a friend and ally, was defeated in France. However, economic developments may ultimately prove more telling than political reverses. When the Chancellor sees the President, he is likely to complain to Mr. Reagan that high interest rates in the U.S. have prevented West Germany from restimulating its sagging economy. Nevertheless, today's weakness may be tomorrow's strength: The mark's decline has put German exporters in a highly favorable position, particularly in third-country markets. Orders are picking up, and David Rawley, an international economist at Chase Econometrics, anticipates an export-led recovery for Germany late this year. In 1982, Mr. Rawley expects real G.N.P. growth to exceed 3 percent. The Fed's Grip Stays Tight While the most recent figures on money supply growth - which increased a modest $3.1 billion in the week ending May 6 - cheered a bond market starved for good news, the effects on interest rates are likely minimal.

AUNIT of the Westchester District Attorney's office, in which staff members feel their most successful cases end in counseling for the accused rather than in conviction, has become a model program duplicated by district attorneys around the country. The section is the 30-month-old Domestic Violence Prosecution Unit, which emphasizes stopping what is usually a pattern of abuse and in aiding the victim. Prosecution is an alternative pursued at the victim's request, and even after conviction a jail sentence is often used as a lever to get an abuser into counseling. ''Traditional sentencing is not working in domestic-violence cases,'' said Jeanine Ferris Pirro, the assistant district attorney who conceived the program and is now chief of the unit. ''The violence is often a learned behavior that is cyclical: a child beaten will beat his children; a child who witnesses wife abuse or husband abuse can become an abuser.

BASIN AND RANGE By John McPhee. 216 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $10.95. JOHN MCPHEE has written with dizzying competence about everything from oranges to the making of bark canoes to the proper method of weighing food. Not only is he an excellent journalist, he is a veritable master of expertise, and his latest book, ''Basin and Range,'' represents yet another such foray, this time into the geology of the American continent in the company of scientists who have spent their lives climbing, hammering and measuring everything mineral they could lay their hands on between New York and California.

For travelers, there is no such thing as a Communist monolith. Americans who visit Eastern Europe or China find that conditions affecting travelers vary substantially from one country to another. The one common denominator is that in every Communist country except, perhaps, Yugoslavia, touring is markedly different from what it is like in the developed countries of the West. Accordingly, anyone planning a vacation in a Communist country this summer has many things to consider, among them visas and currencies, the attitudes and policies of government officials, the pros and cons of traveling in a group or alone and the quality of services and accommodations. Travel in the Soviet Union, for example, is far more restrictive than in virtually any other country in the world that encourages tourism. By contrast, China, as it gradually expands transportation, hotel and sightseeing facilities, is allowing foreign visitors to do more and more on their own.

SAND RIVERS By Peter Matthiessen. Photos by Hugo van Lawick. 213 pp. New York: Viking. $19.95. ''SAND RIVERS'' is a strange, bittersweet, autumnal book based on a safari into the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, one of the last great wildernesses left on earth. Once again we have a clear triumph from Peter Matthiessen, who has delivered so many that I am reminded of D.H. Lawrence's insistence that the only true aristocracy on earth is that of consciousness. Whenever Mr. Matthiessen publishes a book, we learn what new lid of consciousness he has popped through.

To Bill McCarter, president of WTTW-TV in Chicago, the financial crisis in public broadcasting is a bracing relief. ''I liken the Reagan Administration's proposed budget cutbacks to that old shaving commercial in which the guy gets slapped in the face and then says, 'Thanks, I needed that,' '' he said. ''We're at a marvelous pivotal moment now. I don't want to be a Pollyanna, but we're enjoying the largest and most enthusiastic audiences in our history. The Government invested in our early development and now we have to make our own way. That's the challenge.'' Not many people in public broadcasting are quite so buoyant as Mr. McCarter about the problems ahead, but few would disagree that the institution is at a crossroads. Under the Reagan budget, the Federal appropriation to public broadcasting would be reduced from $162 million for this year to $100 million by 1985.

Among the more than 10,000 pilgrims in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday afternoon was a man who was not on a pilgrimage, but a mission. He had means and motive and sought only an opportunity. It came soon enough. When the open white car carrying Pope John Paul II passed slowly within a few feet of him, opportunity catalyzed means and motive into a deed that resounded worldwide. The Pope had been shot - a consummate act of terror in a world surfeited with it. And in the words of Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, Vatican Secretary of State, another ''episode out of the old battle between love and hate.''

In Onida, S.D., birth control information has been removed from the high school guidance office, and the word ''evolution'' is no longer uttered in advanced biology. ''Brave New World'' and ''Catcher in the Rye'' have been dropped from classes in literature. The award-winning children's book ''Run Shelley, Run'' has been banned from the library. In Plano, Tex., teachers no longer ask students their opinions because to do so, they have been told, is to deny absolute right and wrong. In Des Moines, Iowa, a high school student production of ''Grease,'' the hit Broadway musical, was banned. In Mount Diablo, Calif., Ms. Magazine is off the school library shelves; it is available only with permission from both a parent and a teacher. Lobbying Methods Sophisticated Emboldened by what they see as a conservative mood in the country, parents' groups across the nation are demanding that teachers and administrators cleanse their local schools of materials and teaching methods they consider antifamily, anti-American and anti-God.