HOW DO WE LOVE ALL THE CHILDREN -THE POWER OF ONE

[Guest guest]

<A HREF= " http://www.futurenet.org/11powerofone/mcdonough.html " >how do you

love ALL the children: YES! A Journa…</A>

<A HREF= " http:// " >http://www.futurenet.org/11powerofone/mcdonough.html</A>

Fall 1999 ~ Power of One

We can make and enjoy the things we need without destroying the natural

world, says Bill McDonough. This is the task of the next industrial

revolution, and McDonough is one of its designers.

how do you love ALL the children

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bill McDonough asks unusual questions about buildings, like, how can we

design in a way that loves all the children of all species for all time? How

can we design so that the birds flying overhead will recognize habitat below?

What designs tap into the best we can be, and when do we say 'no'to those

that tap into the worst?

     Together with Dr. Braungart, McDonough founded a company to

develop a design protocol for industry based on cradle-to-cradle lifecycles.

In this system, materials either flow through biological cycles, in which

case they return to the soil safely without contaminants, or they should flow

through industrial cycles, returning for use and reuse within industry. This

approach goes well beyond " eco-efficiency, " where the goal is to use fewer

resources to get more done'According to McDonough, eco- efficiency just slows

the rate at which we damage the environment.

     McDonough' s designs, based on these principles, include a model

sustainable classroom building at Oberlin College, the New York headquarters

for the Environmental Defense Fund, a Wal-Mart store, and the new

headquarters for The Gap. His research into fabrics and dyes free of toxins,

mutagens, carcinogens, and endocrine disrupting chemicals led to a line of

fabric so pure that the effluent water leaving the factory is cleaner than

the water going in. The trimmings from this company' s previous fabric lines

had been designated hazardous waste. All this adds up to what McDonough and

Braungart are calling  " the next industrial revolution. "

  van Gelder: Tell me about yourself. Where did you develop an interest

in changing the foundations of design?

Bill McDonough: I spent most of my childhood in Hong Kong. We had four hours

of water every fourth day during the dry season. When a cholera epidemic came

through, we had people dying on our door step. When my mother went to the

money changer to change my father's checks, there would be an old woman

there, begging, using a baby, crying, to elicit sympathy. She would have a

new baby every two or three weeks. I thought that was normal life.

     I spent my summers in the Puget Sound, in a log cabin my grandfather

built surrounded by old-growth fir and cedar. My grand-parents raised

oysters, and they saved rubberbands and aluminum foil, and I thought that was

ordinary life.

     When I became a teenager, we moved to Westport, Connecticut, where 16

year-olds had Porsches. And I realized that we had become consumers with

lifestyles instead of people with lives.

     I learned that third-graders were being taught to dive under their

desks

in school drills, and I realized that we were living as if there was no

tomorrow. Indeed we were creating the condition whereby there might be no

tomorrow. It seemed to me that our culture was essentially partying it up,

waiting for Armageddon, and that in a sense we were not only living as if

there were no tomorrow, we were designing as if there were no tomorrow.

 : How did this early life experience find expression in your work as an

architect?

Bill: While I was still in architecture school, I designed and built the

first solar heated house in Ireland. That gives you a sense of my ambition -

they don't have much sun in Ireland.

     I also had a job with the Irish government photographing indigenous

Irish design. It was so exciting, because I had to look for things that were

pure expression of culture, that were unique and place specific.

    I came to understand that like politics, all sustainability is local, and

that we have to honor place, culture, history, and diversity.

     In 1984, I was hired by the Environmental Defense Fund to design their

national headquarters, which was the first of the so-called " green offices "

in New York. We started asking manufacturers questions about what was in

their products, what they were off-gassing. The answers we got were: " It' s

legal. "   " It' s proprietary.. "   " Go away. "

     We started focusing on this question as an issue of quality: How could

we consider our designs to be of high quality if they make people sick or

destroy the planet?

     In 1987, I was hired by members of the Jewish Community in New York to

design a memorial to Holocaust victims at Auschwitz.

     I went to Poland, to Birkenau and Auschwitz. Birkenau was a mile-wide

killing machine. The railheads were designed so that people who got off on

one side went straight into the gas chambers and on to the crematoria. And

people who got off on the other side went into the slave labor camps and to

be used in chemical testing for the cosmetics industry, among others.

     I had to confront the notion that human beings would actually design

with this intent. Imagine a designer being asked to do this. They were

engineering ways to stack human bodies with different body fat content in

different layers, so they'd be efficiently burned.

     It became very clear and very visceral, very deeply moving, because all

of sudden it occurred to me that there is a point at which a designer has to

say, " I don' t do that! "

 : Where do you draw that line? What are you saying you won't do?

Bill: This isn't in any way to demean or be glib about the depth of evil at

Birkenau, but I recognized that when you look at the products inside a lot of

office buildings and a lot of homes - the glues, chemicals, fabrics, cleaning

fluids, pesticides, herbicides - when you look at, for example, the chemical

soup that gets generated inside an office building with bad ventilation,

you're building gas chambers.

     In 1991, I was asked by the government of Hannover, Germany, to write

the design principles for the World's Fair for the year 2000. I wrote what

became the Hannover Principles with Dr. Braungart, and the city of

Hannover issued them at the Earth Summit. The principles insist on the rights

of humanity and nature to coexist. They recognize interdependence. They call

for accepting responsibility for the consequences of design, for creating

safe objects for long-term value, eliminating the concept of waste, relying

on natural energy flows, understanding the limitations of design, being

humble, seeking constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge, and

respecting the relationships between spirit and matter.

     The people reviewing the principles tried to remove the one about

spirit

and matter, but I said " No. When we sent this to the indigenous peoples to

review, they came back and said there is only one principle: it is that one. "

     It was number eight at the time, and I said, " Why don't we make it

number five? "

     And they said " Well, we're trying to get rid of it. "

      I said " Well, let's make it number three. " So you see where this is

going. Now it's number three.

: How do you and your associates apply these principles in your work

with clients?

Bill: What we're doing is just a beginning. It's what we call the strategy of

change. In this strategy, we admit that we don't know what to do. We have to

be humble. What we do know is that we can't keep doing what we're doing.

     If design is a signal of intent, and we look at what we've done with

the

first industrial revolution, we would have to ask, did we intend to do this?

If we articulated the retroactive design assignment of the First Industrial

Revolution, it would be something like this: " Could you design a system that

pollutes the soil, air, and water; that measures productivity by how few

people are working; that measures prosperity by how much natural capital you

can dig up, bury, burn, or otherwise destroy; that measures progress by the

number of smokestacks and requires thousands of complex regulations to keep

you from killing each other too quickly; that destroys bio-diversity and

cultural diversity; that produces things that are so highly toxic they

require thousands of generations to maintain constant vigil while living in

terror? "

     Is this ethical? It's like asking, " Would you design a death camp? Can

you do this for me? "

     Now, we're not asking people to feel guilty. I want them to make good

products. I'm not that interested in sustainability, because if

sustainability is just the edge between destruction and regeneration then

it's a kind of maintenance - it's a demeaned agenda. I'm interested in

fecundity - regenerative, powerful stuff. Nature's not efficient, it's

effective! You don't look at the cherry tree in the spring and say, 'Look how

many blossoms it takes!'It's not efficient. It's effective, and it's safe.

There's nothing dangerous about the blossoms - they return to the Earth. Look

at me. I just had a baby girl a week and a half ago. We also have a little

boy, four and a half. I have a 100 million sperm in case two get lucky - not

very efficient. But effective and fun! So let's celebrate and delight in

abundance.

: Great! How do you go about doing that?

Bill: You start by thinking about what is here and how it works. You've got a

planet that's chemistry, and we've got the sun that's physics. And then you

put the two together and the next thing you know, you've got this water and

rock under solar flux, becoming the single photosynthetic cell. And then all

heaven breaks loose, the system accrues solar income on the surface, and we

now have incredible diversity and fecundity.

     Then we humans come along, with our brilliant design idea, which is

guess what? Monoculture. Oh, what a concept! Let's come up with one type of

corn and plant that all over. Let's pave the whole planet. Let's regurgitate

all of these persistent toxins that have been put down below by other

bioremediation, phyto-remediation systems over the millennia that have

allowed us to evolve on the surface. And let's spread them around like butter.

      So our whole system is designed around monoculture, brute force,

less,

less, less, less diversity -cultural and biological.

: I'm wondering about how your design principles jibe with the whole

other set of design principles that run commerce, which have to do with

maximizing profits and externalizing costs.

Bill: Oh well, they work together beautifully, I mean this kind of design is

hugely profitable. Here's an example. Herman hired us to design a

factory. We were given a budget of $49 a square foot -not a lot of money. We

built a factory that' s fully daylit and has beautiful air, and it's also

urbane. People feel like they spent their day working outdoors. All the

office and factory workers share the same urban street where everyone drinks

coffee. An office worker with a tie might bump into a guy with a ponytail.

     What happened? We had the Bechtel National Laboratory measure changes

in

productivity resulting from one factor - biophilia, or people's love of

nature; they figured it's worth at least a one percent productivity

improvement. Now that may not sound like much, but when you make $300 million

worth of furniture, 1 percent is $3 million. That 1 percent pays for the

building; Herman says we gave them the building as a present.

     And guess who wins the Business Week prize for the best and most

productive building in America for business? Herman .

     The next year, we designed the Gap Corporate Campus.  Buildings full

of

daylight and fresh air.

     We gave them 100 percent fresh air in their own breathing zone, under

their own control, and 100 percent daylight. The people in this building have

five trajectories to the outside from wherever they're sitting. The roof is a

giant undulating meadow. So a bird flying overhead would recognize habitat.

It would go, " Oh, I evolved for this. Right. There's my food. There's my

people. "

     We used raised floors so we could move cool nighttime air across the

slabs of the building to cool it down. So we reduced the mechanical equipment

by over half and reduced the energy use dramatically.

     Turns out, Pacific Gas and Electric says it's the second most energy

efficient building in their territory.

: Let me ask you a little bit about some of the clients you've worked

with - the Gap, Nike, Wal-Mart. They've all in various ways had some impacts

in the world that a lot of people find problematic: Nike's labor practices;

the Gap's owners who are clear-cutting forests; Wal-Mart's impacts on

downtowns across the United States. You've been very clear about the high

standards you are setting for materials and the conditions of the people in

the particular buildings, but how do you see the companies in terms of their

overall impacts?

Bill: That's a really important question. When I first started working with

Wal-Mart, I got attacked by the environmental world; people were saying " How

could you work with the enemy? "

     And I felt like Henry Thoreau in jail. Emerson came to see him and

said,

" What are you doing in there, Henry? " And Thoreau replied, " I don't know,

Ralph. What are you doing out there? "

     I mean, if we don't work together, we're not going to solve this thing.

We all have to engage on every level and everywhere we can. Let's create as

many models as we can to at least point out, like Boulding said, that

it exists; therefore, it is possible.

     Do I like clear cuts? Nope. Do I think Nike is being serious about

their

intentions? Absolutely. I'm astonished and delighted by Nike. Nietzche said,

what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. These people have responded to

criticism in the most astonishingly responsible ways from what I've seen.

They're fantastic. And we're going to have a shoe next year with

biodegradable soles and recyclable uppers. We leave behind safe molecules for

worms.

: I've seen some of Nike's presentations, and there is no question in my

mind that many people there are sincere. Nonetheless, there are the labor

questions and the underlying message of Nike advertising - that you cannot

have self-esteem, or you cannot belong, without buying an item that is

unaffordable to a lot of people.

Bill: I think that will be transforming too. We've started talking about the

shoe we want to work on, the " world " shoes that are made locally and deliver

performance using local materials at very low cost.

: If you could take your dream design assignment, what would it be?

Bill: In a way I think we just got it. We've just been asked by Bill Ford,

the new chairman of the board of Ford Motor Company, to help reconceive the

River Rouge Plant. This is the home of the first assembly line - Henry Ford's

original integrated manufacturing facility. Bill Ford has asked us to help

him convert it from an icon of the first industrial revolution to the icon of

the next industrial revolution.

: Let me ask you about the challenge you've put out: " How do we love all

the children of all species for all time? " How did you come to see that as

our next design assignment?

Bill: It is the fundamental manifestation of our creative gift that we have

children, physically, and that we then intellectually, culturally, and

spiritually pass something of value on to them. And the greatest value we can

pass on to a child is love. Birkenau is a manifestation of hate. Well, how

many people are actually making things as a manifestation of love? If there's

a message inherent in something as prosaic as a shoe or a building, it's that

you can have these things and not destroy the world. You can enjoy them and

leave something here that has a value for a very long time. We don't have to

have this disjuncture in our world, and we don't have to have this guilt. So

a simple design assignment would be to talk about everything we do as a

manifestation of love.