1999 Designer of the Year

A Message from William McDonough

It is a great honor and privilege to have been selected by Interiors magazine as their twentieth anniversary "Designer of the Year." As I said at the award ceremony in New York on January 29, 1999, our work results from an astonishing amount of collaboration and goodwill on the part of thousands of people and it truly comes from all of us.

I would especially like to honor my partners at William McDonough + Partners, Chris Hays, who works with me in design, and Russell Perry, who manages the firm. I would also like to honor our Associate Partners (Kevin Burke, John Easter, Allison Ewing, Richard Price, Mark Rylander and Roger Schickedantz) and all of the talented architects and staff that have contributed for so many years. I salute you all.

Michael Braungart has had a seminal influence on my thinking. Our company, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, thrives and prospers on a platform of design which Michael and I feel is revolutionary and has been garnering great interest and enthusiasm among many people, including some of the largest corporations in the world. I honor him and his colleagues at EPEA in Hamburg for all the truly marvelous work we do together and for what they teach us every day about the world.

I have found an academic home at the University of Virginia and it has had a profound effect on our work. Being with esteemed faculty, colleagues and some of the most energetic and curious students in the world invigorates the mind and the soul in deep and lasting ways. To everyone in the University community, I am eternally grateful.

But in the end, it must be our families and our clients that we have most to thank for making our lives and our work so productive and pleasurable. So, of course, we dedicate this work to them.

1999 Designer of the Year

How do you save the world? You redesign it.

For William McDonough, Interiors’ 1999 Designer of the Year, global warming, toxic waste, poverty, and hunger can all be designed out of existence. Never, perhaps, has the role of the designer been conceived so broadly and with such urgency. On the cusp of the new millennium, when the earth seems slated for destruction, McDonough is proposing an alternative: a radical overhaul of the attitudes toward energy, natural resources, and production that have ruled since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Through architecture, product design and research, writing, and public speaking, McDonough points up the absurdity of a host of devil’s bargains we have come to accept as inevitable: glass and steel towers guzzling oil to provide comfortable temperatures year round; inoperable windows for climate control that seal in toxic fumes from furnishings; high-quality plastic and metal crowding landfills; industrial byproducts that poison drinking water; towns where every family needs two cars to reach distant stores and workplaces. Some people call this modern life. McDonough calls it bad design.

If "design is the manifestation of human intention," he reasons, then we need to re-examine our intentions. "We must take stock and see that we’ve designed ourselves into a toxic corner. Take an ordinary commercial product. Now explain it to kids: it makes cancer. That’s what we’re making."

McDonough is one of a growing number of designers, writers, scientists, and civic leaders promoting "sustainability": assuring worldwide economic growth while protecting the earth. The concept has been breaking into the mainstream, from the "greening" of the White House to global conventions on toxic waste and greenhouse gases.

While applauding this concern, McDonough considers the typical sustainability agenda futile, since it calls primarily for limiting the depletion of natural resources and the release of toxins rather than redesigning underlying systems of production and consumption. In an essay entitled "A Boat for Thoreau," McDonough writes that this "eco-efficiency" approach "does not tell you to re-imagine the world, it just tells you to leave the world the way it is. Eco-efficiency...is still a linear process headed for zero." Instead of limiting ourselves, says McDonough, we should marshal our design intelligence to fulfill our needs differently.

Good design, for McDonough, reaches beyond aesthetics and functionality. It demands "eco-effectiveness," or optimizing the ecological, social, and economic consequences of everything we produce by adopting nature’s regenerative principles:

"Most designers today are timeful and mindless about where things come from," says McDonough. "They add light. They add cooling. [Such designers] don’t think, ’Am I destroying the world?’ If the market gives it, they use it. I want to do timeless and mindful architecture. Imagine what might happen if we applied these principles starting with the molecule and working up the scale to buildings, cities, and regions."

Utopian? Maybe. But McDonough’s work speaks for itself: wild grasses fed by storm water rustle across an office building’s rolling roof, while night air sweeps under raised floors to cool the structure’s mass; miniature ecosystems purify waste water on a college campus; a fabric’s trims feed strawberry fields.

Dean of the School of Architecture and Edward E. Elson Endowed Professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville since 1994, McDonough has tackled everything from carpets, shoes, and fabrics to private homes, schools, corporate headquarters, factories, and planned communities. He works through both his 23-person architecture firm, William McDonough + Partners, and a product research and design company, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), that he cofounded in 1995 with German environmental chemist Michael Braungart. In 1996, McDonough founded the Institute for Sustainable Design at UVA, a think tank and interdisciplinary educational facility. His desk always piled with lecture invitations, McDonough has addressed not only architecture schools and the AIA, but entities as diverse as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, The American Association of Nurserymen, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where he gave an impassioned centennial sermon in 1993. He represented the AIA at the 1992 Earth Summit, advised the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, and, in 1996, was the first recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development. He developed the Hannover Principles (sustainable design guidelines for Germany’s EXPO 2000 world’s fair), published a recent Atlantic Monthly article with Michael Braungart, and they just won a book contract from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "We must move away," says McDonough, "from the idea of architecture as a privileged activity."

Ironically, McDonough’s wide-ranging work has marginalized him somewhat within the architecture community as a "green" architect. He bristles at the term for its suggestion of single-minded "ecologism." "Any ’ism’ is bad," he says. "You can’t just say, ’You must go solar’ when things in the marketplace may not be economical, or ’You must recycle,’ when the products aren’t made to be recycled. I don’t want a carpet made from soda bottles on my floor. There might be heavy metals in them!"

He attributes the bad reputation of "green" design to early attempts in the 1970s. "Houses became solar machines for living in," he says, tweaking Le Corbusier’s concept. "But people don’t live in solar machines. They live in houses. Good designers avoided ’green’ design because they thought it was ugly. But now we know how to do this with grace." He does think that we need new definitions of beauty. "In a superficial way, I’m a Modernist," he explains. "I love honest expression, the integration of glass into the matrix of mass and membrane. Still, how can it be beautiful if you’re breathing noxious fumes and your eyes are watering? No matter how beautiful, I want out."

McDonough emphasizes, however, that successful design can never be based on the moralizing denial of comfort and luxury that imbues much ecology-oriented thinking. "I’m celebrating abundance," he says. "I love the idea of using beautiful woods, but let’s replace them. I love to use lots of energy, but let’s make it solar. We’re not talking about ’green’ but about sustaining architecture as a valuable human activity. Design will have no meaning if it is just a fashion show. I love the energy of human expression, but it’s a responsibility to make it to everyone’s benefit and to no one’s detriment."

A pragmatist, McDonough is also probusiness. "If something does not make money," he points out, "it is not sustainable." He values the power of large corporations to influence attitudes: if only a few leading companies move toward sustainable practices, and aggressively market that fact, others will be forced to follow suit. "Nike just announced that they are phasing out PVC [a widely used plastic that produces dioxin, known to cause cancer, immune system damage, and hormone disruption]," he says. "Now the other manufacturers have a marketing problem. It created an uproar. Commerce is the engine of change."

Profit-seeking only becomes destructive, says McDonough, when it is the sole guiding principle of business. "I thought when I started that it was my responsibility to provide a safe workplace for my clients," he says. "But I couldn’t do it because the products were not in the marketplace. So should I get sued for it? It is the manufacturer’s responsibility to make safe products. Right now, all manufacturers care about is fulfilling the law with instructions about how to protect yourself from their products. Why are chemical companies selling hazardous waste?"

Like many CEOs, McDonough believes that government regulation unnecessarily interferes with business, increasing production costs, handicapping smaller companies, and making it harder to compete with unregulated businesses abroad. Beyond that, he diverges. "Regulations are really a license to kill," he says, because they condone environmentally destructive practices, albeit in limited doses. McDonough’s solution is not to unfetter business to pollute at will, but to motivate manufacturers to design clean production processes. As a start, McDonough and Braungart worked closely with DesignTex, a Steelcase Design Partnership company, to produce an upholstery fabric so biologically benign that the mill’s effluent is potable water.

If incentive is the carrot, says McDonough, the threat of contingent liability is the stick. "What happens when this gets recognized as a toxic danger?" he would ask companies. "Then it becomes, ’When did you know and why did you not do anything?’ Negligence starts tomorrow."

Born in Japan in 1951, William McDonough grew up in Hong Kong, where his father was the Far Eastern representative for Seagram’s. An early influence on his outlook was the contrast between the scarcity of resources in Hong Kong, where his household received water only every fourth day, and the abundance of clean water and old-growth forests around his grandparents’ cabin on Puget Sound, Washington, where he spent his childhood summers.

In 1973, after undergraduate studies at Dartmouth, McDonough worked on a planning project in the Jordanian desert, where he was entranced by the economy of the Bedouin tent: The porous black fabric provided deep shade but let in breezes, and the weave expanded when wet, making it impervious to rain. This discovery fostered McDonough’s interest in marrying new technologies with the design principles embedded in vernacular architecture. While ancient builders collaborated with nature to great effect, "they also wanted transparency but couldn’t have it," he says. "Today we can do great things with glass," to increase its insulating properties. "Let’s see how, combined, these methods can work."

As a graduate student in the Yale art and architecture schools, where he studied with Walker Evans and James Stirling, he designed and built the first solar-heated house in Ireland. From 1977, he apprenticed at Davis Brody, but grew disenchanted with the abstractness of design as practiced in a large firm, especially after winning a competition for an urban planning project without having visited the site. His first commission, after founding his own practice in 1981, was a house on a ranch near Zion National Park, where he recycled flatbed railroad cars for a bridge. Increasingly interested in alternative energy sources, he also helped renovate and reactivate four hydroelectric plants in Vermont.

He collaborated with J. Woodson Rainey from 1982 through 1986 on loft, apartment, office, and restaurant projects, but it was in 1985, when he was hired to design the New York headquarters for the Environmental Defense Fund, that McDonough found his true calling as a designer.

At a time when "sick building syndrome" had barely acquired its name, the executive director of EDF warned McDonough that if the new offices made any employees ill, EDF would sue him. Taking the challenge seriously, he tried unsuccessfully to determine which chemicals were off-gassed, or emitted, by paints, carpeting and other common building materials. "You couldn’t find out what was in products at that time," he remembers. "The manufacturers were saying, ’This is completely safe,’ or, ’It’s proprietary information; go away.’" In the end, a healthy environment was assured by moving the organization to a building with operable windows and ample daylight, tacking down carpets instead of gluing them, and using water-based paints. The project was also one of the first to use sustainably harvested woods.

McDonough dedicated himself to promoting sustainable forestry in 1985, after flying over Puget Sound and seeing, to his horror, that the vast forests of his boyhood had been devastated by clear cutting. He started the Forest Partnership with Richard Miller who was studying how to encourage small-scale, community-based forestry and the use of non-endangered species. "If all you know is mahogany, then the only other wood you know is pulp," explains McDonough. "You trash the forest to get a few trees out, and the rest become cardboard boxes." McDonough helped Miller develop a database of lesser known woods and their woodworking properties, culling information from international and historical sources.

In a gesture he now calls "poetic," McDonough planted 1,000 acorns in upstate New York in 1989 to replace the oak used in his design for a Paul Stuart store, but he also made the front page of the Wall Street Journal that year for insisting that his client for the proposed Warsaw Trade Center (a skyscraper commission he won by competition) plant ten square miles of forest in Poland, at a cost of $150,000, to offset the building’s carbon dioxide emissions. In 1993, McDonough designed the Heinz Family Foundation Offices in Pittsburgh, one of the first large-scale sustainably sourced projects using lesser known tropical woods.

Since 1995, an impressive range of McDonough’s architecture projects are underway or have been completed, including the Miller SQA factory in Michigan; offices for The Gap near San Francisco; Nike European Headquarters in Hilversum, the Netherlands; the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio; the Monsanto Child Development Center in Missouri; and several private houses. He has also embarked on community and regional planning initiatives, including Coffee Creek Center, a new community in Indiana based on his design principles; recommendations to help Williamsburg, Virginia, curtail urban sprawl and ensure quality of life in the future; and a plan for a "zero-emissions" Eco-Industrial Zone in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In addition to the DesignTex fabrics, MBDC is consulting on sustainable design and manufacturing initiatives with Nike, Monsanto, and Interface, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of carpet tile. McDonough is also designing the Exhibition of the Future for EXPO 2000’s American Pavilion.

McDonough lives in a house designed by Thomas Jefferson, at the broad entry to the gracious "V" of lawn that rolls toward the old library at the University of Virginia. He has immersed himself in Jefferson’s thought and work, marveling at the library’s round reading room below a light-reflecting cupola, where students once followed the sun from window to window. Good design can help fulfill the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he says, and protect future generations from "the remote tyranny" of bad design. His recasting, in a cynical era, of the old ideals makes his radical prescriptions seem oddly familiar, more palatable, perhaps, to a conservative mainstream.

McDonough was addressing an audience in Chattanooga when someone stood and asked a question: "How long is all this sustainability stuff going to take?" McDonough answered, "It’s going to take forever."

Miller/SQA Facility, Holland, Michigan

SQA stands for simple, quick, and affordable. Herman Miller designed this office furniture concept to stay competitive in a growing market niche: assembly and delivery in weeks rather than months. The new facility was to streamline the production process by encouraging communication between office workers and factory employees who traditionally remain separate.

Herman Miller is rated one of the top U.S. companies in terms of employee satisfaction, and this space needed to rise to that standard; avoiding negative impact on the adjacent residential neighborhood was also crucial. Employees were included in the building’s planning process.

The result is a low-slung, graceful arc of a building: 295,000 square feet of glass, steel, and brick nestled in a newly created landscape of wetlands that purify storm water runoff. Rolling earth berms planted with native species mask the truck route and headlights.

Transparency is the central theme. The single-story front section, which contains offices, rises to house the double-height factory area behind. A circulation "street" curves between these two spaces, daylit via a slanted glass roof, which also sends daylight into the factory area over the roofs of single-story multi-purpose rooms. All of the rooms have glazed walls. Enormous light monitors, 30 feet square and raised on clerestories six feet above the roof, provide a feeling of openness and connection to the sky in the factory area.

The bar joist roof system, left exposed throughout the building, helps to visually unify the office and manufacturing spaces. "We try not to create cavities, like dropped ceilings, unless we have to," explains design partner Christopher Hays, "because dust and other contaminants get stuck there and get into the air stream." Air delivery is via a floor plenum system which stays cleaner because it is covered by both floor tile and carpet tile.

The building itself was simple, quick, and affordable: $49 per square foot, including the additional expense of vents and shades to handle the extensive glazing, and took 18 months to complete.

901 Cherry, San Bruno, California

In the hills of San Bruno, California, outside San Francisco, wild grasses wave on a new stretch of undulating fields. This is actually the roof of the new Gap offices. Part of an ambitious program to attract employees in a competitive regional marketplace, the building was intended to further environmental initiatives begun in the Gap stores, including energy efficiency, sustainably sourced woods, and non-toxic materials, and to do so cost effectively. William McDonough + Partners, chosen through a competition, collaborated with architect-of-record/interior design architect Gensler on the 195,000-square-foot building.

Set into a hillside, the building steps up from a lower section containing the main lobby, gym, daylit lap pool, meeting rooms, teleconference center, offices, and café to three office sections joined by daylit atriums. "People would rather spend their days outdoors than indoors," says McDonough; the building brings the outdoors in through daylighting strategies, ceiling treatment, fresh air delivery, and views to the exterior. Broad light monitors, floating above each atrium, follow the east-west axis to maximize exposure to the high southern sun and the even northern light. Curved baffles direct daylight down to the plant-filled circulation spaces and illuminate the open-plan offices arrayed on two levels around each atrium. All offices and workstations are within 30 feet of a window or atrium. Computers raise the artificial light level slowly as dusk falls, while occupancy sensors shut off lights when offices are empty.

Exterior courtyards, including a south-facing café terrace that borders a grove of old oak trees, are visible from indoors, as is one section of the grass roof, which, in addition to its aesthetic charms, catches and filters storm water, provides thermal and acoustical insulation (San Francisco International Airport is nearby), and requires less maintenance than a conventional roof. Parking is hidden in a four-level structure built partially underground.

A system of raised floors, louvers, and fans draws night air through the building to cool its concrete mass, eliminating the need for energy-intensive air conditioning. Enough heat is generated by machines and people to obviate the need for additional heating in the mild climate. Modular carpet tiles and floor vents provide flexible 100 percent fresh air delivery wherever desired, while stale warm air rises and escapes through louvers in the atrium light baffles. These features have enabled the building to expend 30 percent less energy than is required by strict California regulations. Although initial construction costs were higher than usual, due primarily to the raised floor, grass roof, and computerized lighting systems, "in the life-cycle cost analysis, the savings were tremendous," says Maria Moyer-Angus, Senior Director of Environmental Affairs and Energy Management for the Gap. The flexible underfloor system allowed the Gap to switch its office layout three weeks before move-in, and the daytime lighting energy savings alone will pay back the extra expense within six years. "It’s not just a green building," says Moyer-Angus. "It’s a smart building."

Nike European Headquarters, Hilversum, the Netherlands

When William McDonough presented his concept to Nike for their European headquarters in the Netherlands, he suggested that the success of the project be measured "by how many songbirds return." On the outskirts of the town of Hilversum, the site was a grassy field bordered by an old harness-racing track that provided space for extensive landscaping and outdoor sports courts. The site is also adjacent to a former Olympic running track whose 1928 grandstand was designed by Willem Dudok, revered Hilversum city architect of the ’20s and ’30s. Nike wanted a building of lasting architectural significance, while the city wanted its style to be compatible with other residential and office complexes in the area.

Influenced by Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia campus in plan, four four-story buildings form a V shape, enclosing a green lawn with a central volleyball court and widening northward toward the main building across from the grandstand. The central roof section of this main building, planted with grass and serving as a café terrace, is lower than the other roofs, and the south and north facades of the lobby beneath are fully glazed, to allow views of the Dudok building.

The buildings’ narrow plans resulted from the Dutch convention of placing workers no more than 15 feet from a window. Various types of sports courts and gardens, conceived to encourage activities and moods from competitive games to contemplation, lead outwards from the angles of the resulting L- and U-shaped structures. The buildings pay homage to Dudok in their use of his trademark golden-hued Roman brick.

Energy-saving daylighting strategies limited large expanses of glass to the south and north façades. Even with ample glass and large roof monitors, the buildings’ insulation exceeds strict Dutch standards. Closed-system geothermal pumps provide low-energy heating and cooling. Parking is under the main lawn, leaving the grounds to nature. The first building is due for completion this month, so the songbirds should start returning by spring.

Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

A perfect building would be like a tree, says William McDonough, providing habitat for a variety of living creatures, producing oxygen, purifying waste water, nurturing ecosystems, and turning sunlight into more useable energy than it needs.

Such a building demands collaboration. By the time William McDonough + Partners was selected to design the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, 250 students, faculty members, local townspeople, and innovators in the sustainability movement, including Amory Lovins, John Todd, John Lyle, and chair of the Environmental Studies Program David Orr, as well as McDonough himself, had participated in 13 charettes to develop the building concept.

The building and landscape are designed "to show how something is made," says project architect Kevin Burke, AIA, with underlying lessons about the impact of human beings on the earth that most modern architecture masks: the provenance of materials, the elimination of waste, the environmental cost of energy.

The 13,500-square-foot complex includes a two-story rectangular building with classrooms and offices, and a smaller structure that houses an auditorium and a "Living Machine" that filters the building’s waste water through a series of marshlike ecosystems. The purified water is recirculated back to toilet tanks.

The surrounding landscape is incorporated both visually and functionally into the architecture: The main building’s north wall is insulated by an earth berm planted with fruit trees, while a pond and wetlands filter storm water runoff channeled by a grassy swale. A meadow and small woodland recreate the landscape that existed before European settlement.

The classroom building runs along an east-west axis to maximize southern sunlight and winter heat gain for the glazed multipurpose atrium that fills half the space. To combine abundant daylighting with effective insulation, the designers specified the most efficient glazing available: a clear triple-layered glass made in Canada. An eave and a horizontal trellis planted with deciduous ivy provide shade from the high summer sun outside the south façade, while admitting the low winter sun. The glazed east façade provides a view to the pond. Six-foot-high clerestories above the atrium’s north wall admit reflected light and lend buoyancy to the roof. The roof slopes more steeply to the south to better position the photovoltaic panels that generate the building’s electricity.

Motorized controls open low windows to the south and the high clerestories to the north, creating natural convection from rising heat to ventilate the atrium in the spring and fall. Additional heating and cooling are provided by electrically powered geothermal pumps in individual rooms. A raised floor fitted with vents provides fresh air throughout the building. In the first commercial application of McDonough and Braungart’s "Product of Service" concept, the building is leasing carpet tiles from Interface.

The building’s energy consumption is only 21 percent of the national average, according to Orr, an impressive statistic in a cloudy, cold climate. Such efficiency will allow the photovoltaic panels to generate excess electricity on an annual basis. An energy storage system is being worked out with the help of NASA. "The X generation doesn’t see much hope in the world," says Orr of his students. "I wanted to give them a sense of hope and the competence to act on hope. This building gives them possibilities, not just wishful thinking."

Coffee Creek Center, Chesterton, Indiana

The decline of industry in the Rust Belt has led to increasing outmigration. This is bad news for regional utilities dependent on a stable population base. So Nipsco, northern Indiana’s power company, decided to entice people to move back. Through its subsidiary, the Lake Erie Land Company, Nipsco is developing a new community that offers what market research indicates people long for: smaller towns with a strong sense of community and less dependence on cars.

William McDonough + Partners is developing Coffee Creek’s urban plan and design guidelines. Located in the town of Chesterton, Indiana, on 640 acres of former farmland straddling a stream, the project incorporates a pedestrian-oriented streetscape with a mix of retail, office, and mixed-income residential space. While some residents will initially commute 50 miles north to Chicago, the developers ultimately hope to generate local employment for the entire population of 3,500.

Energy efficiency is encouraged within Coffee Creek’s infrastructure, through passive solar heating, extensive daylighting, and roofs that can be retrofitted with photovoltaic panels (PVs). Instead of large, inefficient power plants, many small, local plants would lease roofs on which to place PVs.

"The toughest part will be to get people out of their cars," says project architect Richard Price. Solutions include a dial-a-ride system for custom delivery of goods and people and relatively few parking spaces, with durable grass fields for temporary overflow. Bike paths, sidewalks, seating areas, clustered shopping and entertainment, and modernized versions of old-fashioned social centers will encourage community life.

"Let’s not create an image of Main Street," says McDonough. "A corner store is a place of communication. Instead of an artificial remnant, we’re making a huge front porch with steps to sit on in the sunshine, and a roof like a wing curved for photovoltaics. Children who grow up in the town will have the same nostalgic idea of the corner store, but it’s new and daylit and fun."