Born in Tokyo, William McDonough now lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has designed buildings for Nike, Gap, IBM, Ford, the Smithsonian Institution and the US Environmental Defense Fund. In 1996 Bill Clinton gave him the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the highest environmental honour in the US. He holds a professorship at Cornell University, New York, among other academic posts. His book, Cradle to Cradle, written with chemist Michael Braungart, is published by North Point Press.
What is your home like?
It鈥檚 a little retreat in the middle of the city, full of natural light and fresh air. It鈥檚 quiet. We use natural materials, and the wood is from sustainable oak forests in Virginia.
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What were your childhood homes like?
I grew up in Hong Kong, where millions people lived in just 75 square kilometres. I was in a minority 鈥� an American in a British colony full of Chinese. We had water for only 4 hours every fourth day during the dry season, and I saw people die of cholera, typhoid, typhus, yellow fever and scarlet fever. I thought that was ordinary life. When I went to the money changer with my mother to cash my father鈥檚 pay cheque, there was a woman on the ground below the cash window at the same level as me. She looked 80 years old and she was always holding a dying baby and her begging-bowl. That was the world I lived in: babies dying of starvation. It was a world of limits 鈥� severe limits.
I came back to the US to spend summers at Puget Sound in Washington state. My grandparents lived in a log cabin surrounded by old-growth Douglas fir and cedar in a place of awesome abundance: trees 80 metres tall and clear springs you could drink from. But they saved rubber bands and aluminium foil, things like that. I thought that was ordinary life too. In a world of abundance, you are still careful.
Then I went to high school in Connecticut, where there were 16-year-olds with Porsches. All of a sudden I saw this profligate consumption. People would leave the showers running in the locker room. This was unbelievable to me. Even in Washington state with all the water in the world, you never left the tap running. I went around turning off all the taps 鈥� they thought I was crazy.
Why do you want to redesign the world?
Consider this: 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 more than a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn鈥檛 have a design problem. People do. The endgame appears to have been to create a world in which we have no real idea of the effects of the chemicals we鈥檙e using, on us or the environment, combined with the large-scale and inequitable use of natural resources. But that was then 鈥� people thought they were doing the right thing. Today is another day.
What would your new world look like?
We want to design buildings that, like trees, convert solar energy, putting more energy back into the grid than they consume. We want to create factories that produce effluents you can safely drink. We foresee products that, when their useful life is over, do not become useless waste. They can be tossed to the ground to decompose into food for plants and animals 鈥� nutrients for the soil 鈥� or alternatively can be returned to industrial cycles to supply high-quality raw materials for new products. I see a world of abundance, not limits. Design a product in an ecologically intelligent way and you can use as many of them as you want.
Most environmentalists advocate limiting growth, saying 鈥渞educe, reuse, recycle鈥�. You don鈥檛 agree?
Being less bad is not the same as being good. A lot of environmental thinking is hopeful but perhaps misguided. If you build waste incinerators, you perpetuate a system that is hungry to burn anything with calorific value, for example.
Pundits in the environmental world say: this is great, you鈥檙e making energy from waste instead of putting it in landfill. Actually you are going to have to put lots of filters on those incinerators, and worry about dioxins and mercury. This is not good design.
Many environmentalists say growth is bad, but it鈥檚 a condition of life. Our children grow. The trouble is we have no system of reincarnation that turns something at the end of its useful life into something else.
The Earth鈥檚 natural systems can probably support a few hundred million of our species, but soon there could be 10 billion of us. We need to have a strategy that celebrates every child that is born. Under mainstream environmentalist thinking, a child born in India is characterised as a population problem.
We should also celebrate the diversity of the world. We want 400 kinds of French cheese. What we don鈥檛 want is 400 kinds of French polymer.
When did you start putting your ideas into practice?
In 1977, when I was still at architecture school, I built the first solar-heated house in Ireland. That should give you a sense of my ambition. There鈥檚 not much sun in Ireland but it worked beautifully.
In 1984 my company was hired by the Environmental Defense Fund in New York to design and equip its national headquarters. The executive director told us that if anybody got sick from our building, he would sue. Our lawyers said he meant negligence: in short, knowing better yet doing it anyway. We began asking manufacturers what was in the products we planned to use, from wallpapers to carpet glues. They said: that is proprietary information, go away. We realised then how little manufacturers know about what they are making.
So what happened?
We couldn鈥檛 be sued because we didn鈥檛 know anything. We did the best we could. We used water-based paints and tacked down carpet instead of gluing it. For each person we provided a cubic metre per minute of fresh air, instead of a sixth of that, which is standard. We had the granite checked for radon. We tried to be less bad.
Another critical point for me was when I began to work with Michael Braungart. He鈥檚 a chemist who explained to me the science of whole systems. He made me think, how can I make a beautiful building if it destroys the planet or makes people sick?
Does it worry you being surrounded by potential poisons?
I鈥檓 a designer. Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place, not a worse one. I do avoid obviously toxic environments and I stay in hotels that have windows that open.
You also seem to have fun.
We need to have fun to be effective. Eco-efficiency, where you try to reduce everything to zero, is not much fun. And nature itself is not that efficient. It鈥檚 effective. Take a cherry tree in the spring. It鈥檚 not efficient 鈥� how many blossoms does it need to regenerate? But it is effective: it makes cherries. We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency, but for its effectiveness 鈥� and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there鈥檚 no problem. We can celebrate abundance where it is ecologically intelligent.
From my designer鈥檚 perspective, I ask: why can鈥檛 I design a building like a tree? A building that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, sequesters carbon, distils water, builds soil, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colours with the seasons and self-replicates. This is using nature as a model and a mentor, not an inconvenience. It鈥檚 a delightful prospect.
You spent time with the Bedouin in Jordan. What did you learn from them about design?
As a young person, I could not understand why the Bedouin wore all these layers of black clothing while it was 49 掳C with no shade, nor why their tents were black. I was staying in a British white canvas tent, wearing shorts and khakis. Then I realised that the Bedouin were protecting themselves from ultraviolet. They were also holding in their moisture. The average Bedouin lives on a litre of water a day; I was living on 19 litres a day.
Their tents are made of goat hair and are very loosely woven. They are beautifully lit inside and, as the outside of the tent gets hot, it causes an updraught that sucks air through the loose weave. If you open the tent flaps, the air comes screaming in, even though there is no breeze. It鈥檚 brilliant. If it rains, the goat fibres swell up and the tent gets tight as a drum. And, because it鈥檚 black, the tent shows no dirt. And the factory that made the tent follows you around, eating anything you can鈥檛 and converting any form of biomass into meat, butter, cheese, fur, leather and wool.
Have you incorporated those ideas into any of your buildings?
Absolutely. When we built the offices for Gap in northern California, I used a ventilation system based on the Bedouin model to move cool air across the concrete floors all night long for free, and to get free, fresh, cool air all day long. I tip my hat to those Bedouin for that.
If you sat next to an industrialist of the old school at a dinner party, how would you convert him?
You have to speak the language of your companion. When I鈥檓 working with business people I talk business. We talk about how much money can be made or saved, because that gets their attention. We never try to convert someone who is calcified: we never try to teach mules to play the violin. It sounds terrible and the mules don鈥檛 like it. There are enough thoroughbreds out there who agree that this is common sense.
Where do you most like being?
I like being on my back with my child on my stomach 鈥� in the woods, in the city, wherever. So long as we鈥檙e both laughing.