In 1999, talking about the headquarters he designed for Gap, Inc., in San, Bruno, California—which, among other innovative touches, featured huge atriums that brought natural light deep into the building—Bill McDonough asked this question: “When it’s a nice day, why feel as if you’ve missed it?” Three years later, he asked another reporter, “What if a car were like a buffalo? Now wouldn’t that be interesting?” Last year, waving a rubber ducky in front of his face, he asked a group of industrial designers gathered in Washington, D.C., “What kind of society would make something like this to put in the mouths of children? Design is the first signal of human intention. What is your intention?”
The question of intention could also be posed to McDonough himself. For the past 15 years McDonough—celebrated architect, green-design guru and onetime “Green Dean” of the UVA Architecture School—has crisscrossed the globe from his base in Downtown Charlottesville, making the case for sustainable design to an estimated 150,000 people.
Those rapt audiences have included international businessmen, political leaders, architects, idealists, cynics, liberals and conservatives. His allies are everyone from Teresa Heinz Kerry to Cameron Diaz. As for clients, he has successfully seduced everyone from the Ford Motor Company to the Chinese government with his eco-friendly architectural vision—a vision of design that treads lightly on the earth, uses materials that derive from renewable sources and emits as few toxins and nasty byproducts as possible.
It’s due in no small measure to his success as an orator. In front of a crowd, he is equal parts architect, teacher, designer, savant, preacher, poet and ad man.
“My job,” McDonough tells C-VILLE, “is to speak of the future in the present tense. And to imagine the exquisitely perfect in order to achieve the practically impossible.”
Living roofs, solar heating, buildings that purify their own water: If nothing else, the man is known for thinking big, and often being years ahead of his time. In the late 1970s, when the notion of convincing companies to build green seemed like a pipe dream, McDonough was at Yale’s graduate school designing and building the first solar powered house in Ireland. By the mid-‘80s, he was building the first green offices for the Environmental Defense Fund’s headquarters in New York City. By 1999, Time magazine had named him a “Hero for the Planet” in its annual list of the 100 most influential people.
Sure, there are other green architects and designers in the world, but, for many, the 55-year-old McDonough’s bow-tied style and Michael Keatonesque, camera-ready mug have become the visual shorthand for the entire eco-design movement.
McDonough’s been featured in such glossies as Vanity Fair, posing with a cheeky grin in front of the Rotunda. He’s been featured in intellectual journals like Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. He’s had journalists salivate over him in Fast Company, The Washington Post, News-week, Metropolis, Wired, Forbes and on the BBC.
The coverage is always glowing. One by one, it seems, cynics become acolytes, whether they’ve had the rare honor of a one-on-one interview or they’ve just sat in on the standard stump speech (which, to be fair, is hardly standard).
“Imagine a building like a tree,” McDonough often instructs his audiences. (These catchy, poetic mottos seem designed and market-tested to be oft-repeated.) Touchy feely? Yes. Idealistic? Certainly. But they are also supremely effective, earning their creator a growing reputation as the “supersalesman” of green design.
When asked about McDonough, who had been tapped to revamp Ford’s infamously toxic River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, CEO Bill Ford said simply, “He has a hell of a sales pitch.”
Advertising agencies have figured out that, in order to effectively sell a product, there needs to be a memorable phrase or, for lack of a better term, pitch. Likewise, McDonough realizes that if he wants to change humanity’s worldview, he needs trademarked phrases and a sales pitch, as well. His intention then, to return to the question, is to transform “green” design ideas into easily remembered, yet meaningful slogans.
Just as Nike has “Just do it,” Bill McDonough has “Waste equals food.” Just as Budweiser has “The King of Beers,” Bill McDonough has “Being less bad is not being good.” Just as Sprite has “Obey your thirst,” Bill McDonough has “Imagine a building like a tree.”
Even his website stays on message. Instead of featuring the buildings and the work that McDonough and his Charlottesville-based architecture firm, William McDonough + Partners, has done, the site is largely his face, his biography, his books, his articles (by him and about him) a documentary film about him, and his awards. To the side of the site are smaller links to the architecture firm, materials company and industrial design firm in which he also has a hand.
In short, Coke is to soda as Bill McDonough is to green design. The man himself is a brand; his face is the signifier of an entire movement.
Boiled down, this is Bill McDonough’s worldview: A body shifts ever so slightly in its chair. That chair is made of chemicals deemed hazardous by regulators. As the body shifts, millions of tiny, invisible particles are released into the air to cause cancer, attack the ozone, or slowly poison the sitter’s unsuspecting office mates. The effects of this slight movement are compounded by the fact that the person in question is typing on a highly toxic machine made of plastics, metals and acids that, when inevitably laid to rest in a landfill, will release even more chemicals. Those will only make the cancer worse, the ozone hole bigger, and the death by poison more imminent.
This is no post-apocalyptic landscape. This is the here and now. If you thought nukes were dangerous, take another look at your living room or your cubicle, McDonough insists. In his view, the toxic products our lives are made of can be just as dangerous as a nuclear bomb.
If his crusade is successful, McDonough —who is now on the faculty at Darden, UVA’s business school—will have everyone, businessmen and consumers alike, looking at the world this way. McDonough banks on the assumption that, once people have changed the lens with which they view the world, they can’t help but join his movement to redesign the modern world in the image of nature. He doesn’t just want to make architecture eco-friendly, he wants to make the world eco-friendly. As the subtitle to the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle suggests, McDonough’s grand plan is to “[remake] the way we make things.” He co-authored the book with German chemist and environmental activist Michael Braungart, who also partnered with him to create the “product and process design firm” McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry.
“Waste equals food.” That’s one of McDonough’s big pitches. Those are the three words most often repeated in his lectures and interviews. Here’s his point: Instead of designing on a cradle-to-grave paradigm—the current pattern in which materials are used or used up, then thrown away—he wants the world to embrace a “cradle-to-cradle” paradigm, using only materials deemed safe for the environment, materials that can be used and reused and reused infinitely.
The example McDonough often employs is that of a car, made of reusable components, which could be broken down into its disparate parts and remade into a new car with all the latest technology on a regular basis. This, McDonough argues, would be ecologically sound, while simultaneously good for business and good for consumers.
In McDonough’s view, recycling—that middle-class effort to go easy on old planet Earth—just doesn’t cut it anymore. As he sees it, recycling is simply prolonging the cradle-to-grave paradigm—it’s not reimagining anything.
That said, however, McDonough re-mains pragmatic.
“We’re setting the goal for what it is, a goal,” he says, “to allow people to move toward it. Part of the problem with environmental strategy is that being less bad is not being good.”
The ad man in McDonough really takes center stage when he’s pontificating to a crowd. The “going green” sales pitch is heartily advanced in his slide show. He’s telling jokes; he’s spewing catastrophic facts about the state of the environment; he’s recounting his past successes; he’s reiterating the mantras of his worldview.
But a scan of his interviews and other articles about him show just how well rehearsed his performance has become. Deconstruct the performance further, and McDonough’s plan to win the hearts and minds of the world seems to rely on four equal pillars: the mottos, the rhetorical questions, the pitch-perfect factoids, and his ability to carefully tailor the pitch to
the customer.
First of all, McDonough has a way with words. He’s been known to quote South American poets off the top of his head, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether he just came up with a line on the spur of the moment, or whether he’s quoting a Nobel Prize winner.
According to him, the mottos (like “how do we love all the children of all the species for all time?”) just pop out. He likes the way they sound, his audience likes the way they sound, and they just happen to stick.
“[The mottos] are extemporaneous, and then I gauge the reaction,” he says. “I surprise myself. I get surprised by things that stick.”
Like advertisers, McDonough often measures the success of one of his aphorisms by hearing it repeated back to him—only then is he fully aware of how well it’s traveled from mouth to mouth.
The second hallmark of McDonough-speak is the rhetorical question.
It’s as if he believes himself so completely that he can’t resist asking, “When it’s a nice day why feel as if you’ve missed it?” for example, or “What if a car were like a buffalo? Now wouldn’t that be interesting?” It’s as if the prospect of disagreeing with those interrogations is so ridiculous that the effect of asking them is almost gleeful.
McDonough denies that rhetorical questions are part of any technique, but admits there’s one kind of question he loves.
“I like to ask the question ‘What if,’ because if you’re trying to imagine something, you have to literally imagine it,” he says. “It’s a question, not reality or fact. What I actually say is, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if…’ That’s the question. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if waste equals food?”
Hallmark No. 3 is the perfect factoid.
While his theories about design may be abstract and philosophical, the scientific facts McDonough uses to illustrate the accuracy of his ideas are simple as pie. They conjure crystalline images of the apocalypse. They take big numbers, complex chemistry and physics and turn them into something that a child can picture.
For example: Did you know that 80 percent of what goes through a Wal-Mart ends up in a landfill or incinerator within two months? Or that industrial Ohio is seeing its average IQ plummet? Also, according to McDonough, coral is turning to jelly in the ocean, plastics are piling up off the California coast, and, as he says at the end of the first chapter of Cradle to Cradle, “all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.”
Ultimately, however, someone has to fund all these grand ideas, and that may be why the fourth hallmark of McDonoughism is paramount. He knows the difference between an audience of designers and an audience of businessmen.
When talking to architects, McDonough talks about process. When talking to a roomful of concerned citizens, McDonough says he talks like he would to himself: simply. However, McDonough has earned the greatest fame and praise by having successfully sold green design to big business.
He was commissioned by Gap, Inc. to design the company’s headquarters in California, and proposed a green roof of prairie grasses; he was commissioned by Ford to redesign the company’s notoriously polluting River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan; he has designed major buildings for IBM, Nike and Wal-Mart.
McDonough freely acknowledges that he won these commissions by emphasizing what his customers wanted to hear: numbers, numbers, numbers.
For example, when presenting his plan for the River Rouge plant to Ford executives, McDonough touted the tens of millions the plant would save the company. The $2 billion project is now reputed to have saved Ford $35 million.
He also gives the “all regulation is bad regulation” speech, too. In so many words, this speech can be boiled down to this: “If there is nothing to regulate, there’s no need for regulations.”
Having grown up in a business family (his father was an executive with Seagram’s), McDonough has learned and perfected the language of business.
“As the son of an executive, I heard a lot of that language,” says McDonough. “I don’t know that I was trained in the language of business, but I picked a lot up by osmosis. I picked up the mental models of people who are searching, on a practical level, for positive results in the short and long term.”
So here’s the ultimate question: Is there an ethical dilemma inherent in working with major global businesses that are bent on improving next quarter’s performance, and probably don’t really give a fig about “green architecture” or “cradle-to-cradle” philosophies? McDonough has a well-rehearsed answer on that front, too, as with so much else: “Who am I supposed to be working with?” he asks. The making of Bill McDonough
A brief history of the most quotable man in architecture
Born in 1951, McDonough grew up spend-ing school years in Hong Kong, where his father worked for Seagram’s, and summers by Puget Sound in Washington, where his grandparents lived. His experiences in Hong Kong greatly influenced his outlook on the scarcity of resources—as he later recalled in interviews, the city had “four hours of water every fourth day.” This contrasted sharply to the greenery and abundance of the Washington state forest. As a teenager, his family moved to Westport, Connecticut, where he was ex-posed to the suburban mindset, and high-flying consumer lifestyle, of New York’s upper crust.
While studying photography with Walker Evans as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, McDonough enrolled in a Bauhaus training program (Bauhaus was the German school of architecture that became one of the most influential currents in modernist design and architecture). It was then that the young McDonough decided that he wanted to design buildings, not spend his days developing photographs in the dark.
He enrolled in Yale’s Graduate School of Architecture and began to put his evolving theories on green design into practice. As a student, he designed and built the first solar-heated house in Ireland. (The scarcity of sunlight in Ireland only added to the challenge, and McDonough has often cited it as a telling indication of his ambitions.)
In 1981 he founded his own firm, William McDonough + Partners, in New York City.
In 1985 the Environmental Defense Fund came knocking, looking for an architect to design the first green offices in the United States. McDonough answered the call. His first major commission, the EDF offices gave him the sort of big break that most untested architects can only dream of.
In 1991, at a rooftop party in New York City, McDonough met his future business partner, the German chemist Michael Braungart. According to McDonough, this meeting prompted the first utterance of his favorite aphorism: “Waste equals food.”
In 1995, McDonough and Braungart form McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry to put into practice their lofty design ideals.
In 1994 McDonough moved his offices from NYC to Charlottesville so that he could serve as dean of UVA’s architecture school. He served in that capacity for five years, until 1999. He was known as the “Green Dean,” and brought the school a great deal of renown as a place to study sustainable design.
In 1999, Time magazine named McDonough a “Hero for the Planet” as part of its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The accompanying profile described him as “one that sees that his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world.”
In 2002, McDonough and Braungart published their book Cradle to Cradle, articulating their entire design philosophy based on a “cradle-to-cradle” paradigm, as opposed to a “cradle-to-grave” paradigm.—N.B.
McDonough design in nine easy steps
For the 2000 World’s Fair in Hannover, Ger-many, McDonough and partner Michael Braungart articulated their philosophy for design in a paper called the “Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability.” The principles were later packaged into the more digestible, readable and user-friendly book, Cradle to Cradle (2002, North Point Press) which, four years after publication, still maintains a respectable ranking in the low one-thousands on Amazon. Here, for your reading pleasure, are the Hannover Principles.—N.B.
1. Insist on the rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition.
2. Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognizing even distant effects.
3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement including community, dwelling, industry and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.
4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems and their right to co-exist.
5. Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance or vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes or standards.
6. Eliminate the concept of waste. Eval-uate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems in which there is no waste.
7. Rely on natural energy flows. Human de-signs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.
8. Understand the limitations of design. No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and mentor, not as an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.
9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers and users to link long-term sustainable considerations ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between the natural processes and human activity.
