Designing the Next Industrial Revolution

William McDonough asks unusual questions for an architect—like this one, which he poses to all his clients before undertaking any project: "How do we love all the children of all species all the time?"

McDonough is concerned not just with putting up buildings, but with how his buildings interact with and inhabit the world. And most importantly—citing the traditional wisdom of the Iroquois Nation—he asks what effect they will have on the next seven generations.

It is with this sort of outside-the-box thinking that McDonough has managed not only to land prestigious contracts with some of the world's biggest companies, but also to earn widespread acclaim as an environmental hero and establish a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking designers in the world today.

McDonough opened a dialogue Thursday afternoon at the State of the World Forum on "Ethics, Design and the Making of Things." With an easy speaking style, and sporting a trademark bow tie, McDonough packaged much of his information in anecdotes or catch phrases ("replace eco-efficiency with eco-effectiveness"; "all sustainability, like politics, is local"; "design is the first signal of intention"). The environmental problems threatening our world—from toxic pollution, to deforestation, to global warming—he says, are all problems of design. By ignoring effectiveness, sustainability and our responsibilities to future generations, modern society has designed a world that produces these negative outcomes, and if "preventing negative outcomes is not addressed by a design, it is tantamount to intention."

"When do we become native to where we live?" McDonough asks. "When do we become indigenous people?" If we believed that we are here, and the things we build are here, for the long term, our design decisions couldn't help but be profoundly changed. Would we still build strip malls and traffic-choked freeways and pollution-belching factories?

McDonough recently visited the infamous Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, and saw scientists and engineers meeting to discuss the unsettling topic of "The Semiology of Extreme Danger"—how to develop signage to warn civilization thousands of years from now of the hazardous material buried on the site. Members of the Yakima Tribe were gathered nearby for their own meeting. When told that the government scientists were working on signs for future generations, the Yakima laughed and told them not to worry about it. "We'll tell them," they said.

McDonough takes this notion seriously. What he builds, he builds for the long haul. "Why should it ever be necessary to tear [them] down?" he asks. His celebrated projects include the San Bruno, California corporate headquarters of The Gap Inc., which features a roof planted with native grasses and wildflowers in six inches of soil that not only provides thermal and acoustic insulation for the offices but also fools the birds flying overhead and blends in with the surrounding area. He designed the environmental-studies building for Oberlin College, which uses sunlight to produce more energy than it uses and purifies its own wastewater. And he created the plan and design of Coffee Creek Center, a small-town residential development in Chesterton, Indiana that will counter suburban sprawl, discourage the use of cars and boasts cutting-edge energy efficiency.

McDonough has written about the need for a new Industrial Revolution. The problems that the first one has created cannot be solved with simple remediation; a paradigm shift is necessary. "One might say that the infrastructure created by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century resembles…a steamship," he wrote recently in the Atlantic Monthly. "It is powered by fossil fuels, nuclear reactors, and chemicals. It is pouring waste into the water and smoke into the sky. It is attempting to work by its own rules, contrary to those of the natural world. And though it may seem invincible, its fundamental design flaws presage disaster."

In the years since the environmental movement has moved into the mainstream, industry has started to emphasize what McDonough calls "eco-efficiency," using fewer resources, reducing pollution, doing more with less. And while such measures invariably have an effect on the health of the environment, the motive is principally economic: Cleaning up their acts generally leads to considerable savings. "Plainly put," he says, "eco-efficiency aspires to make the old, destructive system less so. But its goals, however admirable, are fatally limited."

Government regulation will always miss the mark, too. Regulations, he says, are nothing more than indications of design failure. If toxic factory emissions are harming the health of a community, regulations can require monitoring and reduction of the pollution, but "real change would be not regulating the release of [pollution] but attempting to eliminate dangerous emissions altogether—by design."

The new revolution, McDonough argues, must be one of "eco-effectiveness," a concept "that leads to human industry that is regenerative rather than depletive. It involves the design of things that celebrate interdependence with other living systems. From an industrial-design perspective, it means products that work within cradle-to-cradle life cycles rather than cradle-to-grave ones."

One small example that McDonough cites is textiles. McDonough and his colleagues, using natural plant fibers, have designed durable, useful fabrics that are so safe that one could literally eat them.

In conventional application, a textile product like carpeting has a limited lifecycle, and eventually the customer must pay to have it removed. "The energy, effort and materials that went into it are lost to the manufacturer," he writes. "The carpet becomes little more than a heap of potentially hazardous petrochemicals that must be toted to a landfill. Meanwhile, raw materials must continually be extracted to make new carpets."

In McDonough's vision, carpets would be designed not only with safe materials but, more importantly, would allow the manufacturer to take it back when a customer wants to replace it. The carpet could be completely recycled and restored to the customer's desired color, style, and texture. "The carpet company continues to own that material but leases it and maintains it, providing customers with the service of the carpet. Eventually the carpet will wear out like any other, and the manufacturer will reuse its materials at their original level of quality or a higher one."

McDonough's hope is that with an embrace of design thinking such as this, we can roll out the red carpet to welcome a new form of healthy and sustainable industrial enterprises.

copyright © 2000 State of the World, Inc.