The Virtues of Versatility

One doesn't often come across architects who design elegant New York shops or restaurants one moment, and then move earth and build bridges on a Utah ranch the next. For William McDonough it all comes with the territory.

The Quilted Giraffe, a sleek and shimmering stainless-steel-and-granite-clad restaurant that ranks among New York City's top dining spots, brought McDonough and his former partner, J. Woodson Rainey, to public attention several years ago. And more recently, the thirty-nine-year-old McDonough completed a renovation of the men's suit room at the Paul Stuart Shop on Madison Avenue. In this case the style is tradition, as befits the classic American emporium, and English oak paneling, not stainless steel, lines the walls.

The Trees Ranch in Utah is a bigger project than either of the above and has been going on a longer time. McDonough was first drawn into master-planning the ranch in Springdale, Utah, in 1981, when he met James Trees, founder and chairman of the Grand Canyon Trust. Over the years he has worked closely with Trees on such seemingly nonarchitectural concerns as building new bridges, plotting the locations for the apple, peach and plum orchards, and siting a dam on the property. The architect even advised on the aesthetics of the dam itself. When McDonough designed three new staff houses, one of stone and two of adobe block, he found “there was a fair amount of earth-moving just to fit the building into the landscape.”

Now, finally, Trees's own house is next. “It is a total collaboration,” explains McDonough. “We worked seven years on the property before starting to talk about this house. We have learned from the land.”

Architects, like actors, easily become typecast for certain roles. If they design highly stylish interiors, they are not expected to turn out environmentally conscious buildings. If they veer to the abstract and linear forms of modernist architects, with the accompanying emphasis on materials and details, they aren't expected to produce houses that incorporate traditional architectural elements such as gabled roofs, small-paned windows and symmetrical plans.

McDonough embraces all of the above with boyish enthusiasm. The architect, who looks half like a choirboy, half like a cowboy, is not easily pegged. McDonough, who designed the offices for the Environmental Defense Fund in New York in 1986, also recently renovated a town house for the high-style editor of a fashion magazine. And, while he is initiating a newsletter about nontoxic and nonpolluting materials that architects can use in buildings, he is also working on the design of a high-rise tower in Warsaw, Poland.

The Warsaw Trade Center has fifty floors and a twenty-story-high spire, and looks vaguely like a multifaceted rocket. McDonough, who sees it in a softer light, describes it as a giant obelisklike sundial. (He points out that one can tell time by the way shadows hit the surface of the tower as the sun moves around it.)

Until recently, such a tower might have seemed rather pie-in-the-sky for Warsaw, even though the scheme and the architect made the front page of The Wall Street Journal in late October. Nevertheless, with the changing governmental attitudes of Eastern bloc nations toward Western nations, a capitalistically conceived trade center, outfitted with the latest computer hardware and telecommunications equipment, could prove to be strategically well timed. McDonough and his client, a Polish-American developer, Sasha Muniak, have been able to get some Western financial institutions interested in their scheme. Already they have enlisted the international firm of Ove Arup and Partners to act as consulting engineers for the project.

McDonough also proposes developing a park of pavilions, galleries and beer halls around the trade center, all designed by artists and architects. The structures will represent a “microcosm of Poland for visitors coming to the tower,” he says. The architect reports that the Warsaw government has been responding positively to the whole proposal. “But I'm afraid to talk about it too much, for fear of jinxing it,” he adds.

Still, how does the environmentally conscious architect rationalize a high-rise tower? McDonough claims the aluminum, steel and glass prism will rise out of a twelve-story base of concrete panels made of recycled rubble from Poland's capital. Even the aluminum will be recycled, and the interior of the tower will follow similar environmentally sensitive guidelines, which include use of nontoxic materials and dependence on operable windows for natural ventilation.

To be sure, McDonough has big ideas and high ambitions. His environmental concerns, however, are “just one aspect of our work. The architecture derives its nature from so many influences,” he philosophizes. “Clients often live in places where it makes sense to be ecological. We are never hired because of our ecological position. Our clients hire us for whatever reason, and this is one thing we happen to know about.”

The variety of McDonough's architectural work demonstrates his flexibility in responding to each new situation, a pattern that may have been inculcated in the architect as a small boy. McDonough's father, an executive at Seagrams, moved the family all over the world, including Japan, where McDonough was born and lived until age six. Eventually the family returned to the United States and then McDonough attended high school in Westport, Connecticut.

After entering Dartmouth, McDonough held down a series of summer jobs that are hard to come by unless one is highly adaptive. They included being an apprentice champagne blender, VIP tour guide and host in France for G. H. Mumm & Cie., putting together wine cellars for restaurants in the Caribbean, and even working as Benny Goodman's chauffeur in Stamford, Connecticut. “He gave me his Mercedes 1958 roadster,” McDonough says. “Later, by selling the Mercedes, I was able to pay my way through Yale.”

Before entering Yale's School of Art and Architecture, McDonough spent four months working for a team master-planning new towns in Jordan. At Yale he studied both photography and architecture. In another temporary job, McDonough photographed indigenous design for the Kilkenny Design Workshops in Ireland. At that time he obtained his first client: a glassblower living in Ireland who hired the student to renovate a farmhouse and guest cottage in County Kilkenny. One house led to three others in the south and southwestern part of Ireland, all of which used indigenous materials and vernacular forms. The most unusual house he designed, in County Cork, accommodated ducks, goats and a donkey under the same roof as the house's occupants, along with a greenhouse for raising vegetables.

The two houses that McDonough is now working on in Sagaponack, Long Island, the pastoral village on the Atlantic Ocean between East Hampton and Bridgehampton, continue the effort to design according to local building patterns and traditions. “I wanted the houses to look as if they had always been there,” he explains. Both of the wood houses, with their generous overhanging roofs, refer strongly to the Shingle Style turn-of-the-century houses that are found on the eastern seaboard.

McDonough is also renovating his parents' two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old farmhouse in Columbia County, New York. Nearby is his own country house, which he shares with his wife, Elizabeth, also an architect. A neighbor is sculptor Anthony Caro (see Architectural Digest, August 1989), who several years ago involved the architect in a project in which artists and architects collaborated on three temporary structures. In McDonough's pavilion, the templelike first floor was inner-directed and focused. The upper level, open to the view, was a transparent space. It even had a glass floor.

I would say I am a Platonic geometer. I ask, ‘How beautiful is it?’

The two-level structure turned out to be one of McDonough's favorite projects, for he felt it successfully engaged its spectators with the earth, the sky and the water. And when McDonough is asked to characterize his approach to such projects, he answers, “I would say I am a Platonic geometer. I ask, ‘How beautiful is it?’ I am not Aristotelian. I don't ask if it explains the universe.”

Currently, the firm is continuing to design for a wide range of clients in varied settings. Their projects include the sets for the band Kid Creole and the Coconuts in a New York engagement, a house for two quadriplegics in Asheville, North Carolina, an estate for some members of the Rockefeller family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and a large house, guesthouse and children's house on a private thirty-seven-acre island off Southampton. “People, not machines, are the key to creating a profound architecture,” McDonough says with an almost messianic tone. “That ethic infuses our work.”