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 Page 2
"Imagine that," McDonough says, opening an image of the 295,000-square-foot glass-and-steel facility he designed for Herman Miller on his computer monitor. "A green building that wins the highest business award for providing value to a company." Completed in 1995, the essentially transparent furniture factory includes a curved greenhouse-like corridor that joins the lower office section with the higher manufacturing area. Light monitors on the factory roof channel abundant streams of sunlight onto the factory fioor throughout the day. Artificial wetlands planted with native species around the facility retain and purify storm-water runoff. "This building increased productivity at that factory by 24 percent. At their volume, that increase is worth $60 million a year to Herman Miller. The building cost $15 million. Ask any CEO if he'd accept a 400 percent return on an investment. This isn't rocket science, you know. I used to tell designers that we have no choice but to be humble. It took us five thousand years just to put wheels on our luggage."
"We beat a building designed to have the minimal amount of sunlight and the minimal amount of fresh air allowed by code," McDonough says, his words acquiring speed and seeming to acquire mass as they rifie off his tongue. "They were doing minimum, minimum, minimum. We aimed for maximum, maximum, maximum. They were trying to be efficient. They were efficient, and they used more energy. We don't want to be efficient--we want to be effective. Look at a cherry tree. Look at all the blossoms. Is a cherry tree efficient? No, it's effective. Imagine a building like a tree. I'm going to give them a nontoxic environment that costs less to run. I'm going to give them people that are happy to come to work. I want to create life support for people who work, instead of work-support systems for people who don't have a life." In 1991 McDonough, noted green architect, received an invitation printed on a disposable diaper for the opening of the New York offices of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency. The EPEA was created by Braungart. As an activist Braungart had paddled rubber boats to waste sites on the Rhine, climbed chimneys at Swiss chemical factories, and been kicked and punched by security personnel and factory workers. In 1986 he was involved in a Greenpeace protest action on the factory roof of the Swiss chemical company Ciba Geigy. On Christmas Day the executive officer asked Braungart and his colleagues to climb down, offering them soup and fiowers--and giving them his word that they could return if they so chose. The group declined the offer. But when Braungart climbed down a few days later he began a dialogue with the official, which led to a series of meetings with Ciba CEO Alex Krauer. Through these discussions Braungart realized that pure protest, although useful, was at best a partial solution. As an environmentalist--and especially as a chemist--Braungart saw that it was his duty not only to call attention to damage produced by industry but also to propose solutions and alternatives that were ecologically acceptable as well as economically viable. He subsequently created the EPEA.
"He kept telling me, 'You--you are the one, the architect--the one who can transmit this message,'" McDonough recalls. "I told him that he was the one to do it, but he wouldn't listen. Then he started talking about Einstein as a poet, about the destruction of genetic material. I couldn't follow him--I was too slow. So he asked me for a pencil and started drawing on the walls of our conference room. And he kept going, going--like this mad scientist--and we spent the entire afternoon drawing on the walls." The writing on the wall did not foretell the end of nature, nor of the industrial world as we know it. Instead Braungart's scribbled diagrams and words sparked a collaboration with McDonough that would extend the architect's activity into the realms of chemistry, commerce, and heavy industry. The pair's first joint venture was the Hannover Principles, a series of guidelines for sustainable development that McDonough and Braungart began drafting in 1991 for the 2000 World's Fair. In 1995 they established an official partnership, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), with offices in Charlottesville and Berlin. The company consults with manufacturers across the industrial spectrum. In place of fiagellating manufacturers with Judeo-Christian guilt, McDonough and Braungart exhort industry to meditate on a future of transcendent materialism--a brave new world of substances and machines whose souls can be infinitely recycled. |
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