Remaking the Planet

Smart Homeowner, Special Supplement, January 2006

William McDonough's weekend home -- a Virginia farmhouse surrounded by pristine views of the Blue Ridge Mountains -- is the kind of place you'd imagine being able to sit and think a while. What McDonough was thinking about a few weeks ago was noise -- refrigerator noise, to be exact. "There were birds chirping outside, but I kept having to listen to the refrigerator turn on and off," he complains. "I thought, Refrigerator or birds? So I'm putting a switch on the whole house so I can turn the house off. Period. All the fans, all the motors, everything off. Good night. Click. Everything: silence. I can't wait."

What McDonough figured out is that refrigerators don't really need to run 24-7; if you simply load the freezer with ice, thermal mass will get you through 24 hours without melting the Ben and Jerry's. Still, the whole-house switch sounds vaguely iconoclastic -- a minor rebellion against standard operating procedures. Multiply that sensibility exponentially, and you'll have an idea of the kind of effect McDonough, an award-winning architect and industrial designer, is having on the world.

McDonough first got interested in sustainable design as a college student, then in 1981 started his own architecture firm that focused on green building (he designed the offices of the Environmental Defense Fund in 1984). Like most environmentalists of the time, he was working hard to be "less bad," but eventually decided that he wanted to find a way to make buildings that had a completely positive impact. His chance meeting with like-minded German chemist Michael Braungart in 1991 gave him a way to combine vision and technology. The two partnered to found McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, then later distilled their thinking into the groundbreaking 2002 book Cradle to Cradle. Their eco-revolutionary goal: nothing less than the elimination of waste.

Traditionally, products have a finite life cycle that follows a linear, cradle-to-grave path: In essence, all roads lead to the dump. But with the cradle-to-cradle model, designers make products that are infinitely reusable, so instead of being thrown onto the garbage pile, they get "up-cycled" back into the system. For instance, McDonough and Braungart turned an average office chair on its head by designing a fabric for the Rohner textile plant in Switzerland that is so nontoxic it can be used as mulch, while its metal and plastic base can be turned into another chair. They've also worked with Nike to design a shoe tread that will biodegrade into the soil, so the upper can be refashioned into new shoes.

The bigger picture for the cradle-to-cradle model includes new value-added, eco-friendly building systems. McDonough envisions structures that, instead of being a drain on the environment, give back more than they take. Think homes that actually generate energy, roofs covered with grasses that absorb storm runoff, factories whose effluents are as clean as drinking water.

Cradle-to-Cradle Country
Though he's already put many of his high architectural ideals into practice -- as with the $2 billion overhaul of Ford's Rouge River factory in Dearborn, Michigan -- he's now tackling his biggest project yet: China. McDonough has been contracted by the China Housing Industry Association, a quasi-governmental organization that's coordinating development there, to help build seven brand-new cradle-to-cradle cities, with enough housing for 400 million people -- and to do it in the next 12 years. "This would be the equivalent of rehousing the entire United States in seven years," McDonough says matter-of-factly.

Even for a man of large ambitions, it's a daunting project. But this is clearly the kind of Rome-in-a-day opportunity he's been waiting for -- a project that calls for entirely fresh ways of thinking about urban design, construction, agriculture and waste. One immediate challenge is that brick, the traditional building material in China, isn't sustainable. "If you build these cities with brick, they will lose all their soil and burn all their coal. They'd have cities with no food and no energy," McDonough says. "So we've been hired to figure out how to replace brick and yet preserve culture and employment and so on. That's where BASF comes in. We brought in BASF as the world's largest chemical company to assist us in modeling a planet that is a delightful prospect in the future, instead of a terrifying prospect."

In the new Chinese cities, that means building homes with a strong, lightweight, superinsulating polystyrene from BASF. "The materials build very highly insulated buildings that are really safe, quiet and strong." In rural areas, homes will combine walls made of local pressed earth or straw with waterproof, lightweight polystyrene roofing materials from BASF -- an intriguing blend of old meets new. "It's the three little pigs all at once," McDonough jokes.

He's also taking a whole-system view of energy consumption, and with a goal of reducing China's energy use by 65 percent by the year 2020, he's designing large-scale changes. The plans include toilets that turn human waste into nitrogen fertilizer for crops and methane cooking gas for stoves; farms built on city rooftops to reduce the energy required to grow and transport food; and industrial buildings and parking lots that are covered in solar collectors.

One of the things that most excites McDonough about his work in China is that it puts him on the fast-track to replacing oil- and gas-based energy with solar power on a global scale. "My fundamental goal is to get the earth solar-powered, and that means China," he says. "No western country is ready to make that bet on technology. But whatever China chooses will be what the world chooses." If China adopts solar energy as its standard, McDonough predicts that its sheer size will enable it to start manufacturing solar technology quickly and efficiently -- in turn making it affordable for the rest of the world. "If they can drop the cost of solar collectors by a factor of 10, all of a sudden solar power is cheaper than coal, and it can become ubiquitous."

Green Power
As the world waits for cheap solar energy, other, smaller efforts to build differently are earning McDonough's approval. For instance, Cradle to Cradle Home, a residential design competition inspired by McDonough's ideas and sponsored by BASF, is building as its first-place design a home that channels photosynthetic energy from spinach. On the Roanoke, Virginia, structure, solar panels that act as a sandwich for the leafy greens will be attached to a wide, two-story chimney stack. A garden-based biofiltration system will render a sewer system hookup unnecessary. And the home will be constructed with nontoxic materials, the growing availability of which is a boon for homeowners, McDonough says. "The key thing is getting materials that are safe. Most people can't just go out and say, 'I want to be ecologically minded.' The choices aren't there. It ends up being a choice between, 'Do you want to be hung or do you want to get shot?' That's why what BASF is doing is so amazing, because all of a sudden you have choices that you didn't have before."

The Cradle to Cradle Home doesn't quite capture the Jetsons space-age look, but it is a decidedly modern design. McDonough stresses, however, that to be eco-effective (his term, which one-ups "eco-efficient"), a home doesn't have to look strange. "I think anything can be done intelligently. If you go back to any traditional house that people would consider sort of a classic American home -- a Savannah row house, a farmhouse in Vermont, a hacienda in San Diego -- you'll find out they were incredibly intelligent. Ninety-nine percent of traditional homes in most locales would be more cradle to cradle than what we saw in the competition."

So while McDonough has become known as a forward thinker, his ideas for how the average American homeowner can handle energy use are all inspired by the past. A hundred years ago, he says, a New England farmer would have built his home facing south, to take advantage of the sun; he would have placed his chimney in the middle of the home, away from cold air; he would have planted a row of wind-blocking trees to the north, and a leafy maple on the southwest corner to provide summertime shade for sipping lemonade. "Show me a modern American house that has that kind of coherent intelligence in any development," he says. "Now all people do is flip a switch and turn on the air conditioning or heater, and that's it. That's not traditional. That's a result of having lost any sense of a relationship to the landscape since the Second World War, with the advent of cheap fuel."

Don't get him wrong -- he has no beef with air conditioning. In fact, he's not into eco-guilt at all. Although he does find it odd that some homeowners prefer keeping their thermostat steady at 72 degrees over actually opening a window when it's nice outside, he knows that turning off the A/C and suffering through 84-degree humidity isn't going to create the transformation the world needs. What will change things is a major paradigm shift -- and some innovative building materials to help him achieve his vision. "Sophisticated chemicals allow us to enjoy very sophisticated products, without being so sophisticated that they destroy the planet in an effort to give us a one-generation entertainment. BASF understands that it's in it for the long run, so its materials are part of a long-term strategy."

Changing the World Now

To hear McDonough talk, it's not always clear when the concepts he's so passionately elucidating don't actually exist yet. It's been pointed out to him that he always speaks in present tense, even if he's lecturing about a new building concept that probably won't be on the scene for another 20 years. That's because there isn't always a clear distinction between today and tomorrow in McDonough's mind. "I say we're doing these things, and as far as I'm concerned I am doing it, because I'm drawing it. This is called 'anticipatory design science.' We're anticipating the future."

He's also anticipating the here and now, like the imminent arrival of the part that will allow him to turn off his Virginia farmhouse at the flick of a switch. About that, he's almost giddy. "All environmentalists should have more fun than anyone else," he says. "Then everyone will want to copy us."