Former UVA Dean of Architechture William McDonough on building sustainable closed feedback loops in design. ”Doing less bad is not doing more good.”
William (Bill) McDonough is perhaps best known for redesigning Ford Motor’s River Rouge plant with a vast green grass roof. But McDonough has morphed from pure architect to designer of everything. With the publication in 2002 of his book Cradle To Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things, McDonough unleashed a design revolution that began examining not just what things look like, but also the chemical makeup of things: water bottles, carpet, countertops. In the view of McDonough and his design partner Michael Braungart, a chemist, waste can be eliminated by making products that can be either recycled or re-used. McDonough spoke with Forbes Technology Editor Kerry Dolan about sustainability and the future.
Forbes: What’s your next project?
McDonough: The next project from the architecture side is NASA’s new Sustainability Base at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field [near Mountain View, Calif., in the Bay Area].
We said, “Where is the energy going to come from?” instead of just saying “We’ll plug it in and try to be less bad by reducing our energy consumption.” That would be benchmarking. You can’t really benchmark innovation because you don’t leave the box. I mean, Google–one of our clients–didn’t benchmark the Encyclopedia Britannica.
So NASA had the question. “Where’s the energy come from?” Well, it comes from the sun. [i.e., solar power] “OK, now we need coolness. Where did that come from?” you think, “Well, below my feet is the coolness of the earth, 55 degrees. We’ll go there for coolness.”
The building is 7% under budget. The building will breathe. Basically the windows open and close, depending on when and where you need temperature and oxygen, stuff like that. It’ll probably be the most monitored building in the United States. The parking lots will have solar collectors over them, like they have at Google. We expect that the building will be a net energy exporter.
What are you going to do when the sun’s down to power this building?
There are a lot of strategies that’ll be starting to show up. Clearly batteries are one. And that’s something used in space. We will be exporting [excess solar power] to the grid and then borrowing it back from the grid [when needed].
Who or what have been your biggest influences?
I grew up in Japan and Hong Kong and then came to the States.
Japan was a huge influence on me because, as a child, I would hear the oxcarts come and collect our sewage at night out of our house from the latrine and then take it off to the farms as fertilizer. And then the food would come back in oxcarts during the day. I always had this sort of “our poop became food” mental model. The idea of “waste equals food” was pretty inculcated, that everything was precious and the systems were coherent and cyclical.
When we moved to Hong Kong everybody was in desperate shape, typically because they were refugees from Communist China and very poor and destitute. We had people dying of cholera and typhoid and typhus, starvation. Beggars used dead babies to get your sympathy. It was really quite another world. And it was sort of like living in the future. It was a crowded, desperate place with limited resources. You had four hours of water every fourth day.
When we moved to Connecticut, I was a teenager and went to high school. I went to a public high school in Westport. The first day in gym all the boys left the showers running with hot water, just left them on and went back to class. I was just in shock. I couldn’t believe it. And I’m still in shock. What are we doing here? Where are the values? So those things have been a big influence.
In design, people like Buckminster Fuller amazed me at the levels at which he could think.
He could think molecularly. And he could think at the almost galactic scale. And the idea that somebody could actually talk about molecules and talk about buildings and structures and talk about space just amazed me. As I get older–I’ll be 60 next year–what I’ve discovered is that I find myself in those three realms too.
Then the last thing, which is what I’m working on in a lot of cases, is synergetic: the idea that the Earth is a whole system. Fuller really had that range of interest that I think was inspirational that we could think at those scales altogether. I think at the molecular scale with our chemistry work and with Michael Braungart, who is my most influential influencer. He’s inspired me in so many ways.
On the buildings, I’m inspired by modernism. I see that idea that we need a new form as something critical. I mean, we do need to invent and not be benchmarking all the time. That’s important to me.
Are there things that you’re sick of?
I’m sick of people thinking that efficiency is going to be sufficient. I’m sick of seeing people say, “I’m going to reduce my carbon footprint,” and think that being less bad is being good. I’m sick of a lot of people saying, “I have recycled content. And that makes me good.” But they’re recycling PVC, and they’re providing carcinogens and plasticizers into children’s’ environments, claiming to be eco-warriors when they’re recycling cancer. I want healthy, safe things in closed cycles, not just being less bad.
What we do with our work, like our first textile, we did in 1993 with Michael and I. I was designing what it looked like, but we also wanted to design what it was. We looked at 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry and said, “No more cancer, birth defects, mutagenic effects, heavy metals.” And basically we reduced it down to 38 chemicals that were all safe and healthy. The fabric cost 20% less to make. It was clean enough to eat. It’s been selected by the Airbus 380. So if you find yourself at 40,000 feet with a fiber deficiency, you can eat your chair.
How has new technology changed what you do?
Certainly the Internet and the Web have been immensely helpful because we can catalog data with other practitioners on a global basis. That’s pretty exciting. The other thing for me, as a designer and architect, and for Michael Braungart, as a chemist, is that we can start to integrate whole systems and their cross benefits. So we can talk about the benefit to water is part of the benefit to energy, is part of the benefit to society, is part of the benefit to reverse logistics, is part of the benefit to soil and recarbonizing.
Technology helps because of its ability to manage data, to visualize data?
Yes, manage data and render visible interactions. People can get out of their silos, start to see whole systems and think whole systems.
In the era of quick knockoffs, is there still some value in original design?
I think the job of an original designer is to inspire. In that case the knockoffs are just something we hope for. Now the case of green architecture. We did the first green office in New York in 1984. We were very lonely, because we were the first architects in New York to starting asking, “What’s in a product and what’s it volatilizing in the commercial sector?”
Now the green building agenda is huge. It’s wonderful. And they’ve created this LEED standard, [for rating how energy efficient and green a building is] which is benchmarking, which is a good thing to do because most people need checklists. You need standards as reference points. And my job is not to accept that. My job it to push past all that.
