Undoing the damage: William McDonough has designs on the world - environmentalist and architect - Part 2: Architecture

Vegetarian Times, Oct, 1996 by Amy O'Connor

A FIRST IMPRESSION of William McDonough, dean of the University of Virginia's architecture school, would suggest a prototypical retiring academic. He stops home for lunch, then washes his dishes before strolling across the lawn toward his afternoon class. Don't be deceived by appearances. A driving force in a take-no-prisoners environmental movement, McDonough is also a high-powered business executive who shocks industry and government leaders with his radical message: Reform your polluting ways or become obsolete. His design firm, based in Charlottesville, Va., has stunned the corporate world by designing buildings and products no one thought could be made. He even helped save a city choked with post-industrial smog. Now potential clients, many from the Fortune 500, are vying for his services.

While his peers debate whether a palladium window represents a retreat to classicism, he's more interested in designing commercial buildings that convert to living space and sofas that biodegrade. He's involved in civic design, industrial engineering, textiles and water quality--which seem to have little or nothing to do with architecture. McDonough would never design a roof that resembles a Chippendale arch. He would, however, grow native grasses on top of one.

McDonough doesn't peddle the gradualist environmental line most companies want to hear. He wants to stop pollution--and the production of hazardous chemicals--by changing the way the world is designed. To him, the link between product design and building construction is logical; both generate harmful waste when designed poorly. To those who say the solution is to reduce, not ban, toxic emissions, McDonough counters that it's seconds to midnight: time to eliminate anything that causes cancer and birth defects or poisons the air and water. "If we're already going 100 mph toward disaster, going 20 mph isn't going to help much," he says. In other words, government regulations can only slow decline, and recycling merely puts off the moment when a product ends up in a landfill. The solution, according to McDonough, is not tighter legislation--it's better design.

McDonough has devoted his career to redesigning everything from municipal zones to consumer products to office towers. Ten years ago, his ideas were radical and threatening. Today, his peers call him a genius, environmentalists call him a visionary, and Vice President A1 Gore called him the "mastermind of sustainable design" when, last May, McDonough became the only individual ever honored by the President's Council on Sustainable Design.

If most people haven't heard of him, it's because what makes his work environmentally sensitive isn t apparent to the casual observer. His product designs don't sport token eco-symbols; his office buildings don't have miniature-scale rain forests in the lobby. Decades from now, it's unlikely that anyone will be giving tours of his buildings or publishing coffee-table books filled with color photographs of his designs. Aesthetics aren't his main focus; reversing the tide of industrial development is. He refuses to use toxic solvents, paints, dyes or fabrics and minimizes the use of glass, electricity and fuel heating. His buildings can be converted into housing when their commercial use is through. In a quick-fix, image-obsessed, throw-away society, McDonough stands apart: He anticipates future uses for everything.

If you don't think architecture or product design has much to do with environmental destruction, try spending a few days with an architect. You'll learn that petroleum companies have a stranglehold on the construction industry; nearly all its products, from vinyl to carpeting to asphalt, are oil-based. Air conditioning is a major source of ozone-dissolving chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Glues and paints contain toxic solvents that steadily pollute the air long after they're dry. Most buildings are insulated with cancer-causing asbestos tiles or formaldehyde-laden particle-board. And of the 8,000 chemicals used to dye clothes or fabric, less than .004 percent of them are non-toxic. Through McDonough's goggles, your blue jeans are a hodgepodge of carcinogenic and mutagenic chemicals, toxic heavy metals, bioaccumulative dyes and allergens. Your television? At least 4,000 toxic chemicals, 200 of which give off gasses into the room when the TV is on, 18 grams of toxic methyl mercury and an explosive glass tube. The Empire State Building? You get the picture.

At the pioneers conference in San Francisco last year, McDonough put the entire industrial revolution into bleak perspective: "Imagine a system that pumps billions of pounds of highly toxic waste into the soil, water and air; measures productivity by how few are working; measures prosperity by the depletion of natural resources; and measures progress by the number of smokestacks. These are pretty much the design rules of the industrial revolution, and we are living with the consequences."

Sound familiar? Paul Hawken, another leader in the movement to reverse industrialism, sounded a similar alarm in the first part of this series (September, 1996, Vegetarian Times). Like Hawken, McDonough imagines a second industrial revolution, one where the forces of commerce mimic the efficiency found in nature and where the concept of waste is obviated. But McDonough spins it as a design problem, with architects at the forefront of the movement. "A lot of people don't know what design is," he says. "They associate design with a building, rather than, how I see it, as a signal of human intention." To the rallying cry of reduce, reuse and recycle, he adds a fourth mandate: redesign.