Making Good: William McDonough

William McDonough

In this interview, a slightly different McDonough emerges, no less engaging and engaged (in fact with a pantheon of grand projects, such as designing from scratch entire Chinese cities), but with a slightly more wistful and irreverent edge. It was not that McDonough was less optimistic about the ability of thoughtful design to solve some of society’s problems. Rather, it seemed that - in light of the ever-growing list of Earth’s ecological woes - McDonough is more acutely aware of a collective need to shift to mindful design, of everything from chairs to carpets to cityscapes.

Part I

SIJ: Aren’t we still designing products as if there were no tomorrow?

WM: Generally, yes. I think that’s true.

SIJ: Then how do you maintain your motivation?

WM: Design is inherently optimistic. Look, we’re just here to do our work in the world. You choose what kind of work you wish to do, and stay engaged with the issues, and you have an intentional plan instead of a de facto plan. Goals have to be clear and they have to be blue-sky. It’s about keeping on course.

You have to be able to improvise, like jazz. Players can move along together because they have a sense of where they are going and coming back to. Often, if your goals aren’t clear, if you sat down to play music, and John Philip Souza is playing Souza, and the other musician is doing John Coltrane, it will be tricky. Your really do need to know the goal.

We articulate the goal in ‘Cradle to Cradle.’

If we look at the products today, they appear to be designed as if there were no tomorrow. This comes out of a deep historic system of transformation and evolution that has put us into these strange frame conditions.

With the evolution of human experience from hunter-gatherers, picking and plucking what they needed and then leaving behind detritus that returned to natural systems, … came a switch to agrarian societies and staying put, causing the population to burgeon. At the same time, agrarian populations are connected to the ground that they nurture, so they end up working within natural cycles, with very good [soil] amendments. You had to keep your tilth strong on a local level. Then we have a new moment of hunter-gather.

We’ve become hunter-gatherers again, but we hunt fossil fuels and nuclear fuel and electrons and polymers and cellulose. These are commoditized; they are no longer forests or fields. They are abstract platforms for hybridization. They are no longer living things, raw materials. They are commodities. So I think we’ve become hunter-gatherers again.

The other level is psychological, not connected to the physical realm. It’s the whole concept of Armageddon, and that with the advent of nuclear war and its potential, especially with the proliferation after the second World War - the specter of a generation of American schoolchildren diving under their desks practicing for a nuclear attack, that gets psychologically lodged in your consciousness, that the world could end tomorrow. We’re living as if there is no tomorrow because literally it is possible. Things could just be over - mutually assured destruction. It wouldn’t take much. So, I think that’s embedded itself psychologically - that whole idea of “get it while you can, because tomorrow it might not be there.” I think that idea has embedded itself psychologically in a whole generation of people - and their production.

SIJ: Which new products give you the most hope?

WM: The carpet we did for Shaw is really magical. Michael Braungart and I have been talking about carpet and “products as a service” since the ‘80s. So, finally, with Shaw taking it up we thought, great, because it’s the largest carpet company in the world. They finally just did it, and actually created a “Cradle to Cradle” carpet. It’s not “product as a service” in terms of the product lasts longer or gets a longer life so you amortize the damage over a longer period of time and your annual ecological footprint or destruction is less. It’s not like that. This is a product that can cycle instantly.

That’s why I’m so concerned with this thing about the LEED standard that calls for recycled content. The industry can [then] make carpets that are basically sub-optimal, instead of getting up their courage [to innovate the design process itself]. From a re-industrialization perspective it’s actually a terrifying prospect - it means that our industries will continue to make things the rest of the world won’t want.

We should be doing carpets that meet all regulations and go beyond them, and then we can understand and take our place in the global economy, not follow the reinforcement of bad habits through a lot of good intention but unprincipled and quote “environmental” thinking.

SIJ: But in the case of LEED, the standard succeeded because it was watered-down...

WM: No, no. It’s consensus based, and that’s appropriate. It’s critical for us, at this point, to have benchmarks. It brings a lot of attention to the question; it gets a lot of buy-in; it’s a critical step. I was there at the beginning and helped form it. I support it completely. We were founders of USGBC. It’s really great that it exists, but it has to constantly improve - and I think nobody would argue with that.

The tricky part is when it becomes a checklist. A lot of clients will just say, ‘Give me LEED – check, check, check.’ So they get a little recycled content in their carpet; they are not going deeply enough.

As long as active industry players are part of that [LEED consensus] process, and see that their business interests are well-served by taking leadership roles in these types of organizations, [they’ll continue] to perpetuate their products and their various claims, which are essentially incoherent...That’s why we are putting “Cradle to Cradle” forward. It’s a simple principle. It’s meant to be safe. Simple.

Of course, performing it is not such a simple process, it’s complex. The big issues are obviously energy, and logistics, and materials and water quality.

SIJ: How do you train to get to the deeper thinking?

WM: Well, it has to be consensus-based and it is all around coalitions. It will always be a debate, and that’s appropriate. Our job is all around products.

SIJ: You have talked before about design that becomes fecund rather than just less destructive. Do you see an example of that kind of design goal currently, especially in the realm of green building?

WM: We did that at Oberlin. It’s a marvelous experiment with a goal of [designing] a building like a tree. It distills water, it accrues solar income, it makes sugars, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons, it builds soil. So, the idea [was] that we looked at a tree as a design model. It’s a good metaphor but it also means [we ought] to look at cities like forests.

I think our most ambitious idea is in China.

SIJ: How did this project come in to being?

WM: Premier Zhu Rongji and President Clinton as a result of their second state visit they essentially decided to create the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, and I was asked to chair it from the U.S. side. My co-chair is Madame Deng Nan. She is the daughter of Deng Zhou Ping and she is now the party secretary for science.

We’re working with the Chinese government. The Chinese have to build new housing for 400 million people in 12 years, it’s the largest migration ever. We’re doing the designing of whole cities, 28 square kilometers large.

And what we do is what we call the essay of clues. We imagine that we are a bird that evolved for that place and we look down and wonder what we wish to see. And then we get underground and look up and imagine we are a bacteria or a bug or a worm and we imagine what we’d like to see. And those two things are connected. Then we put biota in between, in terms of landscape and hydrology, solar flux and movement and wind movement and soil types and so on. Then we look at the fungible kingdom - and then we put humans in it. We do restorative acts wherever possible, and then lay out the cities and start to put the flesh on it. We try to place the buildings so that everyone has daylight or sunlight. You can if you tip the grids off true north - so we do that. And then we design everything as an asset.

The waste stream goes as input to fertilizer factories, it makes methane…we collect all the water. In one case, we’re looking at putting all the rice paddies on the roofs, so the grey water systems all pump upward, then the black water goes into bio-digesters, depending on the scale. There are integrated work/live spaces, so the ground floors are all shops and stores, in all the buildings, so people can work there so that they don’t need mobility. It’s similar to ancient cities, but it really matters because then you don’t have to have everybody getting on a bus or into a car. The pavement is all porous so it filters the water. We separate the bicycles from the pedestrians so you can get through the cities via greenways.

SIJ: What makes the Chinese willing to undertake something so radical?

WM: It’s practical, and it’s intentional.

SIJ: Are there other cultures where complete cities are constructed or have been so intentionally.

WM: Oh, sure. Look at Angkor Wat.

SIJ: So how long do you project that it takes for your city to become functional?

WM: Well, they are already under construction.

It will take forever, and that’s the point. Editor’s note: Three project designs approved thus far are Wenling in China’s Zhejiang province; Tanguye District in Jinan, Shandong province; and Miyun County in Beijing.

SIJ: Could you elaborate on the comment that you’ve made in the past that the U.S. is a developing country?

WM: Well, I think we are. With the whole offshoring, we’re becoming a de-industrialized country. We need to re-industrialize, but I think we can also recognize that the first round was a questionable strategy from an environmental perspective and in a lot of ways from a social perspective. Unions have lost any ability to keep jobs on shore, so we keep moving toward leaner and leaner production and technology and it’s ironic - we end up with efficient lean production of environmentally degenerative technologies and they start here and then they go offshore.

What we’re talking about with “Cradle to Cradle” is effective clean production of regenerative technology. We are now starting to certify products within the “Cradle to Cradle” framework. We benchmark them and certify the design against the “Cradle to Cradle” methodology. Very few products have been certified - either they are not solar powered, and not producing water, not 100 percent returns, so we have levels of certification. Editor’s note: The levels of certification are featured on the MBDC.com web site.

Part II

SIJ: When you see examples of biodigesters does that get close to the kind of regenerative technology you’re envisioning with Cradle to Cradle?

WM: It’s really part of the puzzle. You still have to question the fundamentals of feeding ruminants which are natural grass feeders, with corn, for example. So if you did a whole systems’ analysis, it would beg a lot of questions about hybridization, and fertilizers and nitrification and water quality, but it’s certainly an important step in the right direction. We’re going to need protein, and those wastes are food for other systems, and methane is more potent than carbon dioxide, so to convert methane from pure effluent to CO2 is an important step.

SIJ: So is it a generational shift that’s needed?

WM: I don’t think it’s generational so much as it is a shift in consciousness. Einstein said no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. So I think we do have to have a new consciousness. Younger people in the universities are treating a sense of social and environmental engagement as second nature. They are kind of bewildered that we haven’t taken this into account. I don’t think they know what to do.

SIJ: How do you keep people’s bewilderment from becoming disillusion?

WM: That’s where the goals come in. Right now the culture has become strategically tragic. All we see are tragedies - endocrine disruption, global warming, persistent toxification, plastics contaminating the fish in the North Pacific, with the gyre having six times more polymer than plankton. Note: Seattle-based oceanographer Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer in 1999 researched a 500-mile section of the Pacific between Hawaii and San Francisco and found six times more plastic bits than zooplankton. These are really tragic events. A quarter of the world’s bird species will go extinct. The younger people see these tragedies and ask themselves did their parents’ and grandparents’ generation actually intend for these things to happen? Design is a signal of intention, was it actually intended? And if it wasn’t why does the current senior generation perpetuate and persist? Because it’s no longer possible to say that it’s not intentional, we have too much information to ignore it, so we can’t say its not part of our plan, it is part of our de facto plan…it’s the thing that happens because we have no other plan.

And so when you find yourself strategically tragic, the entire statute has to change. I think we’re not seeing that at a massive level and yet it is what we recognize is necessary. As we move from having been hunter/gatherers in terms of hard wiring and millions of year of evolution, we see that the nurturing of land is really only five thousand years old – it’s really soft-wired, it’s not hardwired in terms of evolution. We’ve lost the nurturing part and we’re back to this hunter/gatherer. The next shift in consciousness will actually be to recognize that we are hardwired opportunists and honor that as our fundamental legacy of evolution and then overlay that with the nurturing strategy that we’ve developed. Because we are not going back to nature. Natural systems can support only so much, somewhere around 400 million. So we need synthetic materials and closed cycles because if we don’t how do we support the other billion[s] we add. The question becomes, how do we love every child born and not just of our species. That I think will be the transformation and how would that translate into technology…at that point it’s a technological question.

Our western strategy has essentially been that if brute force doesn’t work you are not using enough of it. And then on the back of that is this whole idea that form follows function which has been the mantra. I think what we’ve added is that form follows evolution, and then form follows celebration. So if you look at the history of form, clearly there are functions being performed and even in other species you see a functional relationship where you realize that form follows evolution, adapting to change and to circumstance.

But certainly in the form we’ll see multiple adaptations, for example of finches to different seed types, and that we are growing in the number of species. If there’s an accrual of solar energy as physics connecting to the chemistry of air becoming biology, it’s a form of negative entropy so it’s a growing of the species of taking inert things and [protons?] from the periodic table and combining them in certain fractions and water to become a living thing. And so what is life but the accrual of this physical chemistry.

And we have solar income so we have an accrual of this living system and so as we tar over it we destroy the very life-giving relationship of this chemistry. We are really tackling something that is a fundamental law of life, a combination of physics and chemistry and biology.

Not necessarily trying to break a law of gravity I see this evolution. Form follows evolution, it has been fundamental to us. Then there’s form follows celebration, which is that cultural expression, of something like opera...

That’s where my optimism comes back we are evolving, we thought we had a plan, and we will celebrate the joy of that new goal.

I was at the White House and meeting with federal officials, one of the points I made was that if we allow the tragedies to persist it appears we have no goals except tragedy. How do you play a game if you have no goal? How do you play chess if you don’t know you are trying to get checkmate, if you are just moving pieces around. So I like to put forward a clear blue-sky goal, and then I just align myself with that, sort of like the North Star, or like a sailor would. You set your course based on a destination, that doesn’t mean you won’t be blown off or doesn’t mean you won’t hit a rock or end up in the Bermuda triangle, things are going to happen, you will have to adapt and improvise around the natural forces.

But at least I know where I am going and I can tack, and trim sails. If you are trying to sail somewhere you don’t get disillusioned because you got blown off course, you reset your course, you put it back on your chart and you may only get halfway there.

SIJ: I read once that you said Iceland is your place of inspiration. Is that still true?

WM: I go to Iceland every year for a week with friends. I work with a group of people trying to save the Atlantic salmon. [In Iceland] they’ve never fished salmon offshore they’ve always maintained the ability of rivers to keep abundant salmon so it’s a good long-term strategy.

From a Western perspective the Icelanders represent something quite important, it’s the only culture and language other than Hebrew where the modern reader can read the ancient manuscripts. It’s very rarefied environment, you are right on the Arctic Circle, there are hardly any trees, the sun is centric so everything is a little bit more intense. But it’s quiet, it’s a place to think, away from cell phones and noise. No motors, you can’t hear any motors and you can drink the river.

SIJ: When you worked with Ford on the Rouge plant, did you see “Cradle to Cradle” ideas permeate to design for autos or components?

WM: We were able to work on the concept car of Model U which was a great privilege. It’s the first letter after “T” and the first “Cradle to Cradle” car with materials designed to return to biological or technical cycles.

SIJ: Will we ever see it?

WM: I hope so. That would be nice. … What happens is that we have companies that have the plan and then they develop the transitions and design the product[s], they are not just recycling toxins. So our job is actually producing this stuff so people can say I can order it, I can specify it.

I mean look at the Shaw carpet, for example, it’s really ironic that you don’t get LEED points (other than for recycled content) for an optimized design. Because we are not recycling the garbage, we’re designing it to be recycled perfectly, we can put fillers in so that we can meet the recycled content LEED standard.

SIJ: So you’d need to make it less perfect to meet LEED?

WM: It’s not less perfect, it’s sub-optimal from a pure design perspective.

SIJ: So if you look for a product that would qualify for ‘Cradle to Cradle’...

WM: Like the Herman Miller chair? Have you seen that, the first ‘Cradle to Cradle’ chair. Now Steelcase is taking it on. It’s becoming the standard in office furniture.

SIJ: Have products been put through the certification?

WM: Yeah, we just did the most recent one, it’s Nylon 66 from Solutia. We’re doing different levels of certification, we’re certifying materials.

So this is a face fiber for carpet. That doesn’t mean the carpet that uses it is necessarily ‘Cradle to Cradle’ but the face fiber is, so little steps, one step at a time, we have to get down to the molecules so we will have certified products, too, like the Mirra chair, but we haven’t put that through the drill yet.

SIJ: It does seem like these so-called sustainably-designed goods are really slow to get in to the mainstream and even the companies themselves don’t seem to promote them. What can we do to move things forward?

WM: Buy their stuff. I think that’s it. It’s very hard for them, it’s an added cost, the market doesn’t necessarily understand it. So you need to celebrate it. Now in the case of Herman Miller, they got the PVC out, that was an expensive thing to do, it was a risky venture, but they went ahead and made the investment, and it has rewarded them greatly. We’ve got to continue to reward them in the market. It’s been very successful for them. And they made the right decision.

It’s one of the most sophisticated ‘Cradle to Cradle’ approaches, but they took their time, they did it right they integrated it into the entire design process - all their products are going to be put through the drill - it’s embedded in the culture and the system very deeply, and in the fact that other companies like Steelcase take it on…that’s how it will happen, and it will regenerate American industry, because that chair is not going to China. And the Shaw carpet’s not going to China.

SIJ: O.K. Well, in having to be the tireless promoter...

WM: No, not promoter, I hate that word.

SIJ: Then the tireless motivator.

WM: No, champion.

SIJ: Okay, tireless champion. When do you have the time for design?

WM: When I get off the phone. I’m right here, I’m designing four buildings - a museum in London, a city block of Barcelona, three cities in China, a church in Pasadena.

SIJ: You once remarked that the Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stones. What did you mean by that?

WM: Well, the oil age will not end when we run out of oil. Right now the human species looks like it is going to double its need for power within our lifetime. The only form of energy large enough to meet that demand is either solar or coal. As a culture we can double-glaze the planet or we can move into solar. I’m very active in trying to create a framework, that is, we are circling together to try to make solar energy cheaper than coal.

SIJ: So did you mean when we run out of oil we’ll...

WM: We’ll probably solve the problem before we get there. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones but because we took on bronze, iron...

SIJ: So, we’ll be able to work with our old infrastructure, we won’t have to experience an Armageddon-like event.

WM: Hopefully not. That’s the goal. Have you ever heard my goal? My goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean water, air soil and power – ecologically, equitably, economically, and elegantly enjoyed.

That’s what I expect to have on my tombstone.