August/September 2001

They were--or should have been--strange rostrum-fellows: managers of textile firms, directors of factories, executives from the world's largest automakers. These "eco-outlaws" shared the stage with America's foremost green architect, William McDonough, and Dr. Michael Braungart, his radical German chemist counterpart, on the final day of a recent sustainability conference--lions of commerce lying down with eco-lambs. "This is what the twentieth century believed to be success in industry," Tim O'Brien, director of environmental quality at Ford Motor Company, told attendees at the "EnvironDesign" conference as a grim image of Ford's antiquated Rouge River manufacturing plant fiashed onto the screen behind him. For O'Brien--and for Ford--the presentation was not a mea culpa, but a declaration of intent: "And this is clearly what the twenty-first century is no longer willing to accept."

Offsite:
Learn more about William McDonough + Partners at www.mcdonough.com. Visit McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry's Web site www.mbdc.com. Learn about the EPEA's mission to design and promote ecologically optimized products at www.braungart.com.
Among McDonough's many accomplishments, the enlistment of industry into the Green army must count as one of the most significant. Award-winning architect, cofounder of a designer chemistry firm, educator, and crusader, McDonough speaks a language that executives like O'Brien not only understand but embrace. He is more likely to cite Peter Drucker than Rachel Carson, believes that commerce and consumption are the engines of change, and maintains that a business or industry that does not make money cannot be sustainable. "After they meet with us, large companies realize we're not threatening," he says. "We're not looking for more stringent government regulations. For us, any regulation is a sign of design failure. Growth is good. The question is, what are you growing? Stupidity or intelligence? Sickness or health? Poverty or prosperity? Right now, for every case of leukemia we create nine jobs. Is that our job-creation program? For us, it's not a choice of one or the other. We want to be fabulous at everything--fabulous socially, fabulous economically, fabulous ecologically."

Ford Rouge Center
Dearborn, Michigan, begun in 2000

The Rouge River plant (entrance, above) was considered state of the art when Henry Ford introduced automated assembly-line technology there in 1927. Now William McDonough is giving the industrial relic a $2 billion environmental makeover that will take 20 years to complete. The transformation will include a new 600,000-square-foot assembly plant (below) with skylights and North America's largest planted "living roof" for storm-water management.

The architecture and community-design firm William McDonough + Partners has designed corporate campuses for Nike Europe and the Gap, built a factory for Herman Miller, and created a center for environmental studies at Oberlin College that purifies its own water and is designed to produce more energy than it consumes. In 1999 McDonough entered into an agreement with Ford Motor Company to redesign its 85-year-old, 1,212-acre Rouge River facility, an ambitious and innovative industrial/environmental makeover that will require 20 years--and $2 billion--to complete. McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a firm McDonough founded in 1995 with Hamburg-based Braungart, works with clients including Ciba, Bayer, BASF, Unilever, Visteon, SC Johnson, Milliken, Steelcase, and British Petroleum to engineer what the two have termed "the next industrial revolution." Along with his architectural project for Ford, McDonough and Braungart are working with the automaker and its chairman, William Clay Ford Jr.--great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford--to reinvent the way automobiles will be manufactured and recycled in the twenty-first century. "Henry Ford was the father of the assembly line," McDonough says. "We want William Clay Ford to be the father of the disassembly line."

As an architect McDonough has always worked in concert with sun and soil. Born in Tokyo in 1951, the son of an American business executive, McDonough's first independent project was the 1973 Grant House, the first solar-heated home in Ireland, which he designed during his first year of graduate school at Yale. After completing his master's there in 1976, he worked on small- and medium-scale projects in New York, searching for true north on the rooftops of Manhattan to bring maximum light to his structures. Bright and articulate, McDonough was also a compelling speaker who was frequently invited to address small groups interested in environmental design and architecture.

Herman Miller
SQA GreenHouse
Holland, Michigan, 1995

A sunlit, tree-lined interior "street" (top), which divides office and light-manufacturing (bottom right) space, is also a social gathering place. Fresh air is pumped into the facility hourly, and wetlands (bottom left) were created on the grounds to manage storm water. The design won the first annual Business Week/Architectural Record Good Design Is Good Business Award, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects.
He was commissioned in 1984 by the Environmental Defense Fund to design its New York headquarters. But the project had a catch: the EDF told McDonough it would sue him if any of its employees took sick due to poor air quality or noxious substances in the construction. When McDonough asked his suppliers if they could provide him with a list of chemicals contained in their products, he was told it was proprietary information.

In 1987 members of New York's Jewish community invited McDonough to submit a proposal to design a memorial at Auschwitz. He traveled to the former Nazi concentration camp and also visited Birkenau, the adjacent facility. More than 1.1 million people were murdered in the two camps. He learned how the gas chambers had been designed to kill the maximum number of humans in the most efficient method possible and how German engineers had calculated the optimal way to stack and burn corpses of varying body-fat content. Design, McDonough had always said, is the first signal of human intention. Here he saw it was a sign of the worst possible of human intentions. "I realized that there is a point where a designer has to stop, to look around, and to say 'I can't do this kind of work,'" he said, in a speech delivered last year in Washington, D.C. "'No, I can't design this for you. I can't be a part of this project. In fact, I can't even be here.'"

Back in New York McDonough's vision--and his future--began to take form. He thought about the Industrial Revolution: the glorification of the steamship and grain elevator at the expense of human health and the Earth's ecology. He thought about a system that measured productivity by the number of people not working and progress by the number of smokestacks erected, a system that required thousands of complex regulations to keep industry from killing humans too quickly. He thought about office buildings designed like machines--airtight structures built with toxic materials, minimal daylight, and just five cubic feet of fresh air per minute per person. "What are we building along our highways except for sealed gas chambers?" he asked the Washington audience. "At what point do you get up in the morning and say 'I cannot do this anymore?'"


 



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