Science in a Crowded World

Thank you Rama. Thank you everyone. It’s a real thrill to be here.

I remember being here a few years ago when George Woodwell and I first started talking about the Woods Hole Research Center. "Wouldn’t it be marvelous," we said, "if this little Victorian summer house extended into the forest behind it and, like a leafed branch, started to act photosynthetically?" We imagined this little flower of creativity with roots in the last century aspiring for the 21st, a famously historic building with an anonymous structure in the background doing photosynthesis.

We know, of course, that we have not reproduced a natural system, only learned a bit from nature’s intelligence, so there is great humility in this. It’s unfortunate that the word humility and the word architecture appear not to have been in the same paragraph for quite awhile, probably since The Fountainhead. But humility really is an important aspect of what’s going on here. This building is not an answer as much as an essay of clues. I don’t think anybody’s saying we have an answer. I think we have a series of questions that we’re trying to grapple with and we have a series of clues and a series of intentions.

Intentions are key. I think design is the first signal of human intention. When we have designs on the world, we do well to ask ourselves what our intentions are. As a designer, my intentions are optimistic. Design is inherently optimistic. When I get up in the morning there’s something I have to go get done; optimism is fundamental. So when I think about the future I am fundamentally optimistic. And I think being optimistic, by design, is especially fundamental in times of terror and times of tragedy.

So my work as a designer has given me an unconventional perspective on sustainability. When I was presented the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development at the White House, the press came running up with questions like "Oh, Mr. Sustainable, what does it all mean?" and I said, "Well, actually, I’m not that interested in sustainability." And the reporter said, "What? What do you mean?" and I asked him, "Are you married?" and he said, "Yeah" and I said, "What’s your relationship to your wife? If you say sustainable, I’ll say I’m sorry." Sustainability is not really that interesting. Maintenance is not that interesting. I’m interested in fecundity and celebrations of nature’s abundance and designs that enrich life.

Lots of advocates of sustainability are also advocates of efficiency (doing more with less, reducing, minimizing) and that’s not very inspiring either. If one intends to make efficiency a goal, one has to ask, "Efficient at what?" What if you’re a Nazi? An efficient Nazi is worse than an inefficient Nazi. Is efficiency good? Not if you’re a Nazi.

So I think the question of our time is not, "Are we doing something right or efficiently?" I think the first question has to be, "Are we doing the right thing?" And when we are doing the right thing, when we are acting in harmony with the laws of nature, efficiency can serve a larger vision and we can move hopefully and effectively into the future. Indeed, nature itself is not efficient; nature is fecund, intelligent, and effective. This building is probably slightly more photosynthetically efficient than a leaf. And yet it only begins to approach the complex intelligence of that tree outside the window. How many objects of human artifice do you know that can make oxygen, sequester carbon, fix nitrogen, distill water, provide habitat for hundreds of species, accrue solar energy’s fuel, build complex sugars and fuels, make soils, change colors with the seasons, create microclimates and self-replicate? How many buildings you know have made oxygen lately?

So humility is in order here, but so is a fierce commitment to growth. The idea that we should be worrying about sustainability or maintenance is not what George is here to talk about. We’re here to talk about growth. Good growth. When was the last time you heard an environmentalist talk about good growth? Imagine that. The question really is "What do we want to grow?" Do we want to grow asphalt and destroy the planet or do we want to grow health and intelligence and a beneficial human footprint?

As Francis Crick pointed out in 1962 in his astonishing Of Molecules and Men, growth is a necessary precondition for life.

This is what Crick called the nature of vitalism, the unique character of living things, the idea that growth that supports life is good.

When our designs support life, then growth is good. When our intention is to grow our children’s health or grow ecological recovery or grow socially beneficial prosperity, then we can go way beyond simply tinkering with a design paradigm that is antagonistic to life and begin to redesign our world so that it is in harmony with all of life. To get there we might ask ourselves, "What are the fundamental intentions of our species?" I think that’s the question that the Woods Hole Research Center asks: Are the terrors and the tragedies that we see in the world of our own making? Are they intentional? At this point in our history it’s no longer acceptable to say that global warming, for example, is not our intention. If we say that it’s not part of our plan we have to admit it’s certainly part of our de facto plan. It’s the thing that’s going to happen because we apparently have no other plan. And so as a culture we’ve become strategically tragic. And when any enterprise discovers that it has a strategy of tragedy, it’s time for a strategy of change.

The two questions my colleagues and I are now asking ourselves in our work are: "How do we love all the children of all species for all time?" Not just our children. Not just our species. Not just now. All the children, of all species, for all time. And the second: "When do we become native to this place?" What does it mean to be native to a place? How many of you consider yourselves indigenous people? What does it mean to be an indigenous person? At the Hanford Nuclear Plant, where the U.S. makes plutonium for our bombs and missiles, they had a symposium of senior scientists to consider ways to mark the ground where plutonium is stored so that even an extraterrestrial 5,000 years from now wouldn’t dare to dig it up. This exercise was just repeated at Yucca Mountain. There they used 12,000 years.

Well the Yakima, who were at Hanford for another meeting, bumped into the scientists, found out what they were talking about and started laughing. "You know," they said, "you really don’t need to worry about this. We’ll tell them where it is." The Yakima weren’t leaving.

What does it mean when you’re not leaving?

If you are not leaving do you become a steward of the natural world? There is an ongoing cultural debate over Biblical references to the human power over nature. Some see a mandate for stewardship, others a call for dominion. Many environmentalists have embraced stewardship as the human role in the natural world. But dominion is implicit in stewardship. How could you be a steward of something if you couldn’t dominate it?

So perhaps becoming native to our place means something else. Perhaps the question is: How do we find our kinship with the natural world? When do we see ourselves as part of nature? When those become our guiding questions, worrying about making our current industrial system more efficient or a little less bad begins to seem like an uninspiring prospect. Is being less bad being good? Or is it simply being bad, just less so? Isn’t it ironic that in the English language a double negative is a positive. In Russian a double negative is a reinforced negative. If you’re not not coming in Moscow, you are not coming. Isn’t it also interesting that in no language is a double positive a negative? When a Stanford professor pointed this out to his class a kid in the back of the room said, "Yeah, right." Being a professor is not easy, as any of us could attest.

But I think perhaps it’s time to leave behind trying to be less bad and start trying to be 100% good. Rather than stewarding the planet into oblivion, why not awake to our kinship with all life and leave behind a footprint we can delight in? Why not make the human influence on the planet restorative, vital and good? Why not follow the laws of nature so that we can generate fecundity and good growth? As an architect I have to follow the law of gravity. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. Understanding the laws of nature is fundamental to design. This is the work of the Woods Hole Research Center.

In the modern design paradigm, a house, as Le Corbusier put it, "is a machine for living in." Is the Woods Hole Research Center a machine for learning in? Is a church a machine for praying in? It’s been pointed out by authors in this room (Dianne Dumanoski’s here) that very few products of human manufacture, despite how much air we’re moving around our buildings, were ever designed for indoor use. If we look at the hundreds of known persistent human chemicals in the environment, we’d see that designing machines for living in has become one of the largest nonscientific chemical experiments ever perpetrated. Ever hear of Scotchguard? Remember that? Scotchguard was pulled off the market as a persistent toxin.

The shortcomings of the machine for living in moved the modern paradigm toward the notion of living machines. Perhaps, as was suggested, we might be able to manage nature and reduce our impact with living machines, as was done here at Falmouth and Woods Hole. But then the question has to be, "Are we going to use nature as a tool?" If we can sequester cadmium and mercury in Egyptian bulrushes, what we’ve done uses nature as a tool.

And so perhaps the question that’s implicit in the intention of this building would be not, "Can we design a machine for living in?" or "Could we design a living machine?" but perhaps, "Could we design a building that’s alive?" Imagine a building like a tree. Imagine a building or a project, a complex or a campus that accrues solar energy, builds soil, purifies water, sequesters carbon, provides habitat, changes color with the seasons, and hopefully, self-replicates. That’s going to be tough. If there’s anybody on the planet who can figure that out it is George Woodwell.

Can we replicate designs such as this throughout the world? What does it mean to build in a crowded world? In Curitiba, Brazil, they decided to grow a city that loved all the children. When they build libraries in Curitiba they don’t build mausoleums for books in the middle of the city remote from residential neighborhoods, they put the libraries within 12 minutes walking distance of every child. Under a plan developed by former mayor Jaime Lerner, libraries were built by giving the budget to local neighborhoods, so that instead of sending the money to São Paulo to some big contractor, local people would build their libraries in their home places. The city would then put a little, pastel-colored lighthouse out front with a glass room 10 meters up. When children see that there is somebody in the lighthouse (and some of them are occupied by volunteers 24 hours a day) they know the library is open and safe. And if children come to these libraries barefoot from the favelas and they don’t have any money for books they might need to buy, they can pick up cigarette butts or garbage on their way, put them in the right bins and get paid for their work in books. Every single child has all the books she needs for school and they’re all being given access to the World Wide Web. That’s how they’re building libraries in Curitiba.

But Jaime Lerner suffered a rather severe criticism from his own citizens because he had placed the libraries on the edge of the city. The children from the favelas outside the city limits were coming in and using the libraries and the citizens complained that their parents weren’t paying taxes. Those children shouldn’t be using the library, they said. And Jaime’s response was, "When you start to love the children, you have to love all of the children because if the city can’t love those children too, then those children will grow to hate the city. And if they hate the city, they will destroy the city."

And as we see from the work of the Woods Hole Research Center, we have to love every single child who’s born on this planet. Many environmentalists say that there’s a population problem, that some child being born in India is a population problem. Saying so diminishes that child’s existence and our own. We have to love every single child who’s born in the world because if we don’t love all the children in the world, those children will grow to hate the world, and if they hate the world, they will destroy it.

Questions from the panel

Dianne Dumanoski: I wanted to take off on your little riff on Le Corbusier and "a house is a machine to live in" and ask you, when you get to this final stage of redesign that you’re imagining, you’re still calling it a machine? A living machine? I think that it becomes something that’s not a machine and maybe we need to graduate from the machine model of reality that the modern era has bequeathed us into some other word. I don’t have a word to give you, but this is a part of the conversation. Maybe we need to have different metaphors.

William McDonough: I think that’s a good point. I mean what we call the living things, but I still think we’re talking about objects of human artifice, whether it’s a chip or whether it’s a building. It’s still this question of the human technological integration. I mean I’ve seen various calculations that have shown that with various levels of so called "consumption" the natural world could support between 200 and 500 million of our species. And so we’re not going back to nature with 6 billion people. We are definitely going to have to engage the objects of human artifice in a very profound way. If we all wore Birkenstocks and cotton the world would run out of cork and dry up.

What we then need to do is look at what it means to make things and then talk about the making of things. And in that sense we are dealing with technology and perhaps if that technology has characteristics of living things "the machine" may not be the right word for it. And we can talk about it in a much richer way. I think that is an exciting prospect. But it really is, I think, another metabolism of technology that we need to engage and it has a metabolism. In the same way that Crick recognized the biological metabolism, we might want to recognize the technical metabolism.

Barbara Little (a community activist and Woods Hole resident): You did say that, "How do we shepherd without dominating?" Would you like to elaborate on that? Because I think a good shepherd doesn’t dominate.

William McDonough: I was talking about the concept of stewardship and the idea that we do preservation. It’s amazing to me how you’ll walk into a hotel and in most hotels you’ll see a sign that says, "Help us save the environment," and it might want to be described as, "Then help us destroy the environment slightly less quickly." I don’t know how many of those things are actually positive acts of fecund nature, and so I think it’s important for us to want to preserve and conserve and all the conservative agendas are really quite critical. But at the same time, I think, the idea that we would just simply try and be less bad and then think of that as stewardship perhaps doesn’t recognize the real concept of what stewardship is, because the shepherd tending flocks is dealing with a long-term strategy. We have seen in China that their agriculture was perpetuated for 40 centuries until the mid-century when it all started to just change gears as it took on a whole new kind of external input relationship and the whole idea of mineralization, rather than nutrient flow, took over. So I think the idea of stewardship is actually really critical, but it does imply that we have the ability to affect the planet in a very serious way and it’s not a question of standing back and just letting nature happen, because we’ve always been very much part of the natural world. And so then the question becomes, "What is that relationship and can we engage it richly?"

Steve Curwood: Question for Professor Addington. If you don’t need to heat the whole building, but just the person, how do you begin to conduct such an experiment?

Michelle Addington: Well I’m working on that answer. But probably the thing I’ve most been wrestling with is along that and trying to get there a lot sooner than I have been with my small little computational fluid dynamic experiments. What is it that architects can do to make that happen? And a few years ago, I started taking a look at light. You know light, of course, is a subset of thermal phenomena and lighting is one of those ambient systems, which as we see, have what’s known as an ambient system in this room. We’re lighting the space not what we’re seeing. And so in working with the physics department and with the psychology department, we realize that our lighting standards are anywhere from 2 orders to 3 orders of magnitude higher than what is required in order to see. So we’re not talking about 10% or twice as high, we’re talking 100 to 1,000 times higher than what we need to see because the eye deals with things in a relative fashion. So thinking in terms of discreet, I’m thinking in terms of discreet in relationship to the body, and not the building. We worked on a series of experiments where the students had to light spaces at Harvard and the requirement for the class was that vision had to improve. The space had to be more pleasant and more desirable and more useful, but they had to use one-tenth of lighting energy in order to do so. I decided to make it a modest reduction rather than demand that they do it at one-hundredth. This they can do and indeed we found that even with existing spaces that a few small modifications began to move it in that kind of direction. So that’s one example of that. The work that I’ve been doing with the discreet heat, I’ve had good results computationally and this fall I’m getting a new tiny little lab, so I hope to have a few good results empirically and then hopefully, probably long after I’m dead, we’ll have this as a chance for a paradigm for the future if more people start working in this area.

William McDonough: Let me tell you a story. At the cathedral, St. John the Divine, when Dean Morton was there, he asked a group of people, including me and a very well known energy commentator, to come and talk about how to solar heat the cathedral. And the first proposal was to dig up the cathedral close and put a giant pond that would act as an ocular lens and concentrate the sunlight on pipes at the bottom of a saline solution and deliver heat to the cathedral. And I have great respect for the person who recommended it, but he’s a physicist. And I thought to myself we’re having little squirrels in the sycamores that weren’t there before and then I thought, "Well wait a second. Have we asked the wrong question?" Should the question be, "How do you solar heat a cathedral?" or should the question be, "How do you heat people in a cathedral?" And so I was reflecting on what good Presbyterians in upstate New York did during the winter, which was carry a stone that they had heated up on their stove with them under their quilt in the carriage and then when they got to church they put it under their feet and covered themselves with a blanket and sat through church. Because why would you heat a building that sat there empty all week long when you need it for two hours on Sunday morning? And so we ran some numbers to see what it would mean to build a laundry and shower center for homeless people in that part of New York City that during the week would produce all the hot water that the homeless would need for their laundry and for cleaning. And then on Saturday afternoon we’d crank it up and we would send the hot water to the slabs underneath the first few pews, which could be paid for out of the collection plate, rather than costing 15 million dollars, which was the other proposal. And so I think the question there was, "Are we heating people or are we heating a building? And why are we doing all these things in the first place? And we can zoom in on what is really essential."

This building that we did for The GAP in California with its green roofs and its raised floors and thermal flux, we got a call from the utility there. And they said, "You know your building is using a third of the energy of the most efficient office building we can find and so we’re concerned. Send us your drawings." We said, "What’s your concern?" Well again some famous energy gurus had been working on an office building and they had minimized the daylight. We have 100% daylight for everyone and we don’t minimize light, we like to optimize light. Yeah, we can see in moonlight, but it’s pretty rough after awhile. And so we said, "Let’s have daylight for everyone, fine views of the outdoors, fresh air delivered to your breathing zone, so on and so forth." And we were using a third of the energy of the most efficient building. The least amount of light, the least amount of air, least amount of energy. And so they were afraid that we weren’t giving our people enough fresh air. That’s what they were afraid of. Because everybody else had minimized and therefore we’re using a third of it, we can only be giving a third of the air. And it turned out we were giving 100% fresh air to everyone in their breathing zone under their own control because we had used raised floors for the whole building and they cooled it at night like a hacienda. Very simple technique. So what we said to the engineers who came in to do the study is that we were trying to design a life support system for people who work instead of a work support system for people who don’t have a life.