William McDonough, FAIA

The renaissance man of the green movement

AR: Corporations seem to be jumping on the bandwagon because of the commercial implications. Could you talk a little about the implications of this for you as a planner and designer? What does it mean to you that a broad group, not just a few, are interested and engaged?

WM: Two aspects are exciting to me in terms of my work. One is that many people are adopting cradle to cradle and the specific strategies that Michael and I are proposing. It’s a framework that can be understood by anyone. Things go back to nature; they go back to industry. The result is clean water, clean air, people being treated fairly, and life goes on. The other is that with so many people taking this up, I can now move on to the next level. Clients have become sophisticated, which allows us to continuously push the envelope. So we don’t market ourselves; we respond to the marketplace.

AR: That’s interesting. Do you have competitors?

WM: We’ve been careful not to compete with other people.  We just want to do our work. The Latin root for compete, competare, means “strive together,” go forward together. I think I’ve also made a considered judgment not to expose my work broadly, but rather to expose the ideas broadly. And our ideas are not inconsistent with other peoples’ good ideas. Other groups may be very focused on, for example, efficiency or being less bad; we’re focused on being more good, because being less bad is still being bad. It’s good to be less bad but it’s insufficient. Most of the people with whom we might compete are still efficiency people, and so we don’t really compete with them.

AR: Tell me how your work started in the U.S., but grew international.

WM: My first building was in Jordan. When I graduated from Dartmouth, I followed my professor of urban planning to Jordan as a field representative for the 100-year master plan team for the Jordan Valley. I lived with the Bedouins, building settlements for them. After being nomads for millennia, they were settling, due to border closings in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. We had to figure out what it meant to settle a Bedouin.

AR: So early on you were thinking internationally?

WM: I always thought I’d be a U.S. ambassador, because when you grow up overseas and look for an American male role model, it’s going to be an ambassador.

AR: You are now working in China. What’s your take on China’s challenges? 

WM: China is just so explosive. It’s like wrestling a supernova. It’s expanding and contracting simultaneously, so that it’s both a terrifying and thrilling prospect.
           
Two things we see in China. The Chinese have a long history of relating to the landscape and regard it as perpetual. So when they get the idea that we’re designing for perpetuity, it makes sense to them. The other thing is that the President of China has called on the country to adopt a circular economy, and we’re regarded as part of that.
           
One of the reasons I’m working in China is that, as Napoleon apparently said, “Let China sleep because when she wakes she will shake the world.” China is shaking the world now. She has us by the throat. She can flip a switch and turn off our economy. So why would we not want to engage thoroughly and try to make sure that our relationship is on a good footing? People often ask me why I work with corporations that have been the key culprits in destruction, and my response has to be, ‘Who am I supposed to be working with?’ China’s the same way. How could I not be involved in a place that’s going to build new housing for 400 million in 12 years? Why would I not want to be a miniscule part of this huge undertaking?, and we’re considered very much part of it.

AR: You are working on at least one city plan in China. Talk about what it means to do a whole place from scratch. It isn’t often that people get the opportunity.

WM: On a personal level, it’s very humbling. You can only posit a set of frame conditions in which the city as an organism can grow. It’s a thrill to be able to imagine the possibilities of whole systems, like human sewage treatment, as a positive material and a nutrient instead of a liability.

AR: Let me change gears a little. Are there challenges that you’ve faced that you haven’t found a solution for or things you’ve tried that didn’t work?

WM: Definitely. When you do experimental work you don’t slide from success to success. You kind of lurch from one stumble to the next. We stumble all the time. The things that we tried and didn’t really work out had to do with business. We’ve discovered that we’re far better as leaders than as managers. The other thing I’ve learned is that there is no instant success. We really have to keep going step by step in our plodding kind of way. It requires a kind of persistence and care. Someone said, paths are made by walking them. So we’re just trying to walk the path, just keep going.    

AR: You’ve chosen to keep your firm at a certain size as well.

WM: Right. I don’t have the mental or physical capacity to manage a huge enterprise. I have no desire to try. I like what I do. I like where I do it. I want an organization that’s only large enough to get the work done and small enough that I can stay in touch with everybody in it.

AR: This is counter to a trend for architectural firms to get larger. It’s a discipline you’ve imposed on yourself.

WM: I’ve met with CEOs who ask what’s my business model, and when I tell them I’m a small service business, their jaws drop. I’m perfectly happy economically doing it the way I do it.

AR: How is it financially?

WM: Like any small business, we’re always on the edge, but we’re used to it. My personal security financially comes from a well-honed team of people doing important projects extremely effectively for our clients. That’s hyper-productive. I get royalties from the products I’ve designed, a sort of annuity. I make hay while I sleep, which is a good thing for someone in our business. And my time has become immensely valuable to a larger group, so I get to speak to big trade associations and corporate leaders, and I get paid for it.

AR: What do you see as your primary strength as a professional, as who you are?

WM: I’m totally comfortable in a corporate boardroom. I’m comfortable in a neighborhood meeting. I’m comfortable in a group of designers chewing over some knotty problem. And I think that has been incredibly valuable.

AR: Who taught you to do that?

WM: I think growing up in an English colony, Hong Kong, and having to learn Latin. My father was president of Seagram overseas, so I spent a lot of time as a high school and college student with senior business executives. Their language doesn’t sound unfamiliar. My broad experiences and the fact that I’ve been not only in professional practice but also in academia gives me confidence. I think confidence is a big part of it. I’m very confident. I’m very confident when lost that I will find a way out or find my way to the center. I’m not afraid. I know I’m not going to give up. Plus my father always insisted that we work hard while we were growing up, so we had a work ethic, and we always had jobs. I don’t expect anybody to give me something for nothing.

AR: And what do you think are your primary drawbacks, liabilities?

WM: I’m generally happy with my life. I wish I could let go of the work once in a while in order to be completely present with my family. There are times when I’ll be thinking about some big idea when I should be focused on my daughter’s piano. I wish I had more ability to suspend this work for a while, just jog into ordinary life.

AR: You may have all the architects in the country seeing this interview. What do you want to tell them?

WM: One is that we are ready to help architects and others with our deep chemistry. We would like to connect thousands of firms and individuals through our website and make available our databases and cradle-to-cradle approach to them. We’d like hundreds of firms to become cradle-to-cradle firms, and we’d like to assist them in transforming industries that make things. As our tools develop, we would share them. We’d like to save firms the trouble of forming their own “green teams.” We’d share our available resource information and that of thousands of people around the world. We happen to focus on design chemistry, but there will be others who concentrate on botany, zoology, energy, water, social fairness, food. There are thousands of experts in different fields that need to be connected. That’s the multi-disciplinary part. If we all said we want cradle-to-cradle things—carpets, shoes, cars—that’s hugely powerful. I would invite everybody to join us. That would be one really important message.

The other message is that what we’re doing is fundamental to human rights. You know Mencius, [the fourth-century Chinese philosopher] said that if there were enough barley and millet in everybody’s larder, there would be no more altercations. The fact that we could be running out of natural resources makes the growth of human population. If each child being born is seen as a problem, then human rights cease to exist. So we need to restore the soil, or industry needs to upcycle it. We need to see petrochemicals as an asset, so they can be made into plastics and not burned. Right now the fear of scarcity is fundamental to our human relationships. Cradle-to-cradle is a celebration of a world of abundance not a world of limits. That’s the big message.