As a building contractor and journalist interested in sustainability, I routinely speak with people operating in areas of green building and other eco-friendly endeavors, and a couple of years ago, the name William McDonough began popping up among my colleagues. It was a name I hadn’t run across in my own research, and it came connected to claims that struck me as so wild they seemed almost like science fiction. Last year, I heard that McDonough would be speaking at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies, an ecological think tank in Millbrook, New York. I have to admit that the things I’d heard about him were so fantastical, they had kept me from investigating the man and his work any further. Nevertheless, I went to listen.
McDonough appeared in his signature black clothes and bow tie, to deliver a Zen-cool, often poetic slide presentation from a laptop. It’s easy to see why people fall for the guy. He has a fabulous command of the language and is a convincing and charismatic speaker. He cuts through mental clutter with disarmingly simple and grounded logic.
McDonough is widely considered one of the pioneers of green architecture. He’s a world-renowned architect and designer who’s won three US presidential awards: the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003), and the National Design Award (2004). Time magazine once named him a “Hero for the Planet.” He was born in Japan in 1951, and lived in Hong Kong before getting degrees from Dartmouth and the Yale School of Architecture, after which he opened an architecture office in New York City. In the 1980s, when global warming was little more than the obscure nightmare of a handful of climatologists, McDonough designed a solar-heated house in Ireland and a green office complex for the Environmental Defense Fund.
In 1994, he moved his firm, William McDonough + Partners, to Charlottesville, Virginia, and assumed the post as dean of architecture at the University of Virginia. The Washington Post reported that on campus McDonough was known as the “Green Dean,” and promoted “zero pollution and total recycling.” McDonough left UVA in 1999, to serve his expanding vision of building construction and design in the private sector. His work with sustainability has led him in diverse directions. He’s worked with Rohner, a Swiss textile firm, to find nontoxic ways of colorizing and manufacturing fabrics, and with Nike to remove hazardous materials in their footwear.
At Oberlin College, in Ohio, his building for the environmental studies department is powered by solar and geothermal energy, and is designed to generate more energy than it uses. In 2002, he placed a 450,000-square-foot “living roof” of grasses and plants on top of Ford’s River Rouge truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan. The roof captures and neutralizes runoff from the plant, reportedly saving the carmaker some $35 million in environmental costs.
McDonough is what you might call a design epistemologist, a philosopher of the values we reveal about ourselves through the things we create. Speaking to a group of product designers, he once held up a rubber duckie bath toy, recited a litany of the toxic effects of the chemicals used in its manufacture, and asked pointedly, “What kind of society would make something like this to put in the mouths of children?” In Millbrook, his talk wove a tapestry of poetry, architecture, design, psychology, philosophy, ecology, geography, and politics into a comprehensive—and plausible—vision of the future.
After his hour-long presentation, I introduced myself to McDonough, told him about my own work as a green builder, and asked if there were any possibility of interviewing him for publication. After a congenial acknowledgment of my credentials, he gazed deeply into my eyes and said, “Well, probably not. It’s right down to the minute for me now. Can you understand that?” Some time later I attempted to schedule a brief phone interview, and was told by his in-house public relations assistant that his time was prescheduled for four months.
Why is McDonough so busy? As he puts it, “I am involved in the design of furniture, wall coverings, textiles, solar collectors, cars, buildings, [and] cities.” Since 1995, he has collaborated with German chemist Michael Braungart, an environmentalist and founder of the Chemistry Section of Greenpeace International. Together, Braungart and McDonough have created a materials design firm, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), to, as they state on their website, “promote and shape the next Industrial Revolution.” MBDC has a client base made up of some of the leading corporations of the industrialized world, including—in addition to Ford, Nike, and Rohner Textil—BP (British Petroleum), BASF, and Volvo. The Chinese government hired McDonough to establish an eco-friendly municipal plan for the city of Liuzhou that will remake it into a high-density, 5,400-acre urban center with easy access to parks, clean water, and mass transit.
The concept of “remaking” is fundamental to McDonough and his partners. “I believe we can accomplish great and profitable things within a new conceptual framework—one that values our legacy, honors diversity, and feeds ecosystems and societies, … ” he writes. The entire concept of waste and how we deal with objects when they reach the end of their useful life is critically scrutinized in a philosophy he calls “cradle to cradle.”
“Think about the making of stuff,” McDonough has said. “And think about what goes into stuff. Over 90 percent of the stuff that we use to make something ends up in a landfill in a few months…. The present industrial system is an immense amount of material flowing toward landfills and incinerators. What we have is a cradle-to-grave system: a landfill is a grave…. The cradle-to-cradle strategy that I’ve developed with Dr. Braungart … has touched so many aspects of life. What we’ve been able to do is to take materials from nature, put them into cycles, and take them back into nature where they can replenish and renutrify the soils. Or, take technical materials like metals from the mines, metals from existing products, and put them back into existing industrial cycles so that they form a cradle-to-cradle loop for industry.”
In cradle-to-cradle thinking, when a product reaches the end of its useful life, it should be possible to recapture the component materials of that object in such a way as to maintain all of their potential usefulness. In a sustainable, McDonough-perfect world, all of our stuff could be remanufactured into something that is of equivalent value to the original, or, through purification, perhaps even “upcycled” into products of higher quality. Additionally, the cradle-to-cradle philosophy views materials that are normally not easily recycled—nylon, for example—as “technical nutrients” that should be recaptured and reused in a closed loop.
McDonough has produced a book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which is as much an icon of this philosophy as it is a primer on it. Cradle to Cradle is a revolutionary object, a book designed to be completely recyclable. This short volume (under 200 pages) is an easy-to-read manifesto that highlights the pathology of modern design, and suggests measures to reform it. It deals with questions of manufacturing in sweeping terms, at one point even describing how particles from commonly-used articles such as shoes and fabrics can contain toxic chemicals that, when inhaled, act as endocrine disruptors, neurotoxins, and potential carcinogens. “What would have happened,” the author muses, “if the Industrial Revolution had taken place in societies that emphasize the community over the individual, and where people believed not in a cradle-to-grave life cycle but in reincarnation?”
To that end, the pages of Cradle to Cradle are made of a fully reusable polyester, and the ink can be recaptured with heat. While the book represents a conceptual revolution in product design, it has its drawbacks for the average reader. As a result of its construction, the book, though brief, is not thin, and its heft in the hand is noticeable. And the waterproof synthetic pages do not permit highlighting or taking notes in the margin.
Nevertheless, in Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart outline an utterly revolutionary way to reclaim our future. McDonough has said that he believes we have less than a quarter-century to reverse the effects of global degradation brought on by modern industrial practice. In Waste = Food, Rob van Hattum’s new documentary about MBDC and the cradle-to-cradle ethos, McDonough ponders the changes necessary to maintain a perpetually habitable world. “I think that the fundamental transformation will occur because of economic forces,” he tells the filmmaker. “It won’t be because of some moral issue or some technical revelation. It’ll be because waste is basically stupid.”
At one point in the film, we watch McDonough at work with the Ford Motor Company during the $2 billion rehab of its Dearborn facility. As the film progresses, we see Ford executive Timothy O’Brien proclaiming McDonough’s worldview: “Today it takes 50,000 pounds of raw materials to make a 3,000-pound car,” O’Brien says. “That’s a lot of waste, and we can change that. Why don’t we use 3,000 pounds of materials to build a 3,000-pound car?”
As a corporate client, O’Brien succinctly reveals what differentiates McDonough and Braungart from their competitors. “I was honestly, emotionally moved by Bill and Michael,” he admits. “When you first meet them they look a little kooky. At least certainly to an American businessman. When I met Bill McDonough he was wearing a bow tie, a cape, and a beret … and Michael was this chemist from Germany that used to be in Greenpeace. Your initial reaction is that these guys are nothing but trouble—why do I have to work with them? Bill’s objective with us was ‘we want this to be a site where you would be happy to have your children play.’… Now, we have a site with wetlands, green space, wildlife, and honeybees. In reality, that was a businesslike objective and it was measurable. … The world’s full of dreamers, and I don’t have any time for dreamers. I have time for people that are inspirational, and have thought through the real issues that you have to deal with as a business and have developed a formula to successfully navigate that challenge.”
“You’re really a Buddhist designer,” says Michael Toms near the beginning of his lengthy interview with McDonough in a six-CD set titled The Monticello Dialogues. The insight was triggered after McDonough disclosed that he was after a “timeless mindfulness” in his designs.
“Well … somebody called me a bodhisattva once,” responded McDonough. “I thought that was interesting.” But if McDonough possesses an enlightened heart, he also embodies the sweeping ambition of a world-changer. “When we look at the scale of the concerns that we have today, the opportunity is of immense scale,” he says. “The opportunity involves all of us on the planet, and I think that is something totally unprecedented in the history of our species. The human species manages the planet now. And so the question is not ‘Can we save the planet?’ The question is ‘Can we save ourselves?’”
There are a number of media resources available to learn more about the work of William McDonough.
McDonough’s website, www.mcdonough.com, provides information on architectural activities and his design firm, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, as well as extensive links to newspaper and magazine articles.
Cradle to Cradle, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart,
is published by North Point Press, 2002
(www.fsgbooks.com/northpointpress).
Waste = Food is a new documentary on McDonough
and his philosophy by Rob van Hattum
(First Run/Icarus Films, www.frif.com).
The Next Industrial Revolution: William McDonough, Michael Braungart and the Birth of the Sustainable Economy is a 2001 documentary about McDonough + Partners by Shelley Morheim.
It runs 55 minutes and is narrated by Susan Sarandon.
(Earthome Productions, www.earthome.org).
The Monticello Dialogues is a six-CD set of interviews conducted by Michael Toms, principally at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. Organized topically, the discussions are titled: “Democratic Design,” “A Revolution in Thinking,” “Design as Celebration,” “The Rebirth of the Commons,” “Designing Peace,” and “Cradle to Cradle: Going Green.” Amazon lists the set as “currently unavailable”; contact the publisher for further information. Also available as MP3 download. (New Dimensions World Broadcasting Network, 2005, 800-935-8273; www.newdimensions.org.)
This article appears in December 2007.
