Written by Pio Barone Lumaga, and published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE  Volume #10
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– Is it good?

– Extraordinary. Right down your alley, she replies. I smile at the confidence in her voice while sipping a fragrant cappuccino in a café overlooking the Amstel River. I am paying a visit to Michela, my daughter, who is working as an architect in Amsterdam

– You know that we’ve been exchanging book tips since you were 3 years old! The book she is referring to is ‘Cradle to Cradle – remaking the way we make things’, one of those books capable of branding us with a new diffused awareness, under the skin. A pragmatic inspiration source that alters how we see ourselves and the world around us. That conversation in A’m two years ago led to two interviews with one of its two authors, German chemist Michael Braungart; now it is time to introduce you to the other one, American architect Bill McDonough.

We meet in Copenhagen at the SAS Royal hotel, designed by Arne Jacobsen, at 8.45 on a cloudy May morning. We greet each other among a host of multicoloured ‘Egg’ chairs. He is wearing a light blue shirt with buttoned-up collar, a dark pair of chinos and leather loafers. He is 183 cm tall, weighs 95 kilos, and carries his 58 years well. He speaks softly, keeping his eyes engaged with mine, sometimes leaning towards me to press a point. His cautious smile starts from the left of his mouth, bounces to his brown eyes and resurfaces at his mouth.

Pio Barone Lumaga (PBL): Sustainable Architecture has become a buzzword but still many projects fall short and very little architecture, besides being energy-efficient, is as ambitious as those that you design. Could you comment on this? William McDonough (WMcD): Peter Drucker, the management consultant used to say that it was the manager’s job to be efficient and it was the executive’s job to be effective and do the right thing. So efficiency and effectiveness go together, but just being efficient is insufficient. For example in energy if we want to be 100 % sustainable it means that we want 100 % renewable power, so a solar-powered building is efficient. Thus efficiency is a good thing because it helps you to be effective, but if you are only efficient it means that you are still using fossil fuels, nuclear power and just using less of it. But being less bad is not being good, so the challenges we all have – me as much as anybody else – is to find ways to anticipate the future and set up a design protocol that is productive and regenerative.

PBL: You said that design is the first signal of human intention, yet today about 95% of the world’s constructions completely ignore their effects on the environment. There seems to be a great need for a new worldview. Are you working in this direction? WMcD: Yes. The work we do is trying to build examples, as best we can, of what we are thinking about. So we can point out that if the building is covered with habitat, this is a signal of intention of the idea that the human footprint should be a positive thing instead of a negative one.

PBL: Is today’s crisis putting extra strain on sustainable projects? WMcD: It’s true, but also most businesses realize that when we come out of the crisis the market place will look for new responses because the old ones were ineffective or, worse, effectively disastrous. I believe that the people planning on success in a near future are looking at sustainability as a critical agenda.

PBL: Which of your projects are closest to your ambitions? WMcD: The corporate campus that we did for GAP, designed in 1994 and finished in 1999, documents my intention. It has an undulating grass roof, the interior is full of daylight and fresh air, and is designed to be convertible into housing if the users’ will changes. The Lewis Center for Environmental Studies is interesting because it makes more energy that it needs to operate, it purifies its own water, and it is a building like a tree. And the Ford Rouge project is good because it indicates how we can think in terms of sustainability in a large-scale industrial context.

PBL: Is it fair to say that your activity as an architect goes from the micro to the macro scale? WMcD: As an architect working at the level of a building, at a certain point I discovered that I had to look at the molecules, the part to the whole that relates at the level of the very small. That’s how I started to work with Michael [Braungart]. I was looking for a toxicologist and once we realized that we were building in an environment, a town, a landscape, we had to start thinking also about the context. So today our work ranges from molecular assessment to urban planning.

PBL: Are you planning a city in China? WMcD: For China we did a conceptual plan for third-tier cities, not a romantic project with lots of money but the nitty-gritty of a city. For the city of Liuzhou we did the master plan for the expansion. We started to imagine how the city could become a city powered by solar energy, but the most dramatic idea was moving all the farms onto the roofs. That came from a statement of Premier Wen Jiabao that by the year 2020 China would lose 20 % of its farmland if urbanization continues at the present rate. Our basic thought was that there was no reason why we could not have agriculture and city together.

PBL: You are one of the most recognized actors of the Sustainable Movement. What are the challenges for you as a person and for us as society? WMcD: In a strange way the challenge that Michael and me face is that we have come up with a discovery – the Cradle to Cradle paradigm – that if we put things into biological and technical cycles, if we develop a reverse logistic system then we eliminate the concept of waste, we move toward renewable energies, clean water and social fairness. This is a discovery of a way for humans to act, not an invention, and in that context it has to be given away. So one of my challenges that I share with Michael is how to make it free. We have developed databases of thousands of chemicals, for example, assessed according to their effects on human health to a level that is unprecedented. How to make it public? Right now it is our intellectual property and the tool we use to do our work, but because of the discovery factor that means that once you understand Cradle to Cradle you cannot see the world in the old way. So one of my challenges is the structural design of our enterprise in order that more public can benefit. For society itself, the integration of Cradle to Cradle into society is going to be a great challenge because it means that we have to redesign almost everything. These two challenges are pretty big.

PBL: How are you going to encourage these changes? Your situation has similarities with that of the designers of open-source software like Linux versus proprietary operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows, or the Genome project. When an intellectual property is made available to everybody, there is a surge of creativity around it, changes happen faster and great unexpected things develop. Do you have a plan, or are you still at the drafting table? WMcD : We are still at the drafting table. We are thinking of housing the database and the certification program in a non-profit institute and making it available to the world on open access. Not an ‘open source’ per se – open source means that people can mess with the data, and we don’t want the data messed with because it is science. We will have lots of people doing input but they will have to be registered as scientifically-viable input sources. The institute where we would have the Cradle to Cradle intellectual property would be the centre where the people would bring their assessment to be certified, and in the process the database would grow and be available to all the assessors and everybody would grow together. Right now there are over 100,000 chemicals used by humans. We have thousands of them in our database, but we want to see all 100,000+ in the database, so it is going to take years of work by thousands of people to achieve this thorough quality. We really want Cradle to Cradle to stand for the quality of biological and technical nutrients cycles, regenerative redistribution and reverse logistic, clean air, clean water, clean energy, clean soil. We want to stand for that because we want to make sure that it is characterized fully, otherwise anybody running just an eco-efficient project would say that is a Cradle to Cradle one.

PBL: What motivates you? WMcD: Well … the thrill of discovery, it’s constant learning because we are dealing with something that is new and fresh and everyone we meet has a potential influence in what we are doing. It’s like a sparkling, refreshing state of mind that allows you to engage with people in new ways and I enjoy working with people and learning from them… so having a platform of curiosity and creativity to live without needing to be constantly excited. [Laughs]

PBL: How would you like to be remembered? WMcD: I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson when he designed his tombstone; he chose as his epitaph: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom [which became the Bill of Rights], and father of the University of Virginia” He did not mention his presidency, he recorded his legacy but not his activity. So I would like to be remembered for my legacy and not for my activity. Running around the world talking to people is not a glorious thing to do, it’s hard work. I think the Hannover Principles was an important document, I think Cradle to Cradle is a legacy, and the buildings will speak for themselves over time.

PBL: Is there something important that we have not touched upon in this short conversation that you would like to add? WMcD: I think there is a hidden dimension of Cradle to Cradle that is not obvious to people, and was not obvious to us: Cradle to Cradle is ultimately about human and natural rights. If you look at the history of rights in the American context, we moved from Magna Charta, the rights of noble males, to the Declaration of Independence, the rights of white landowning protestant males, only 6 % of the population, to emancipation of the slaves, to suffrage for women who get to vote in 1920, to the civil-rights access from the Fifties to 1973, when even the human being is given the right to exist with the endangered species. You can see this trajectory of understanding the right of humans and also the right of nature to exist. We won’t be able to celebrate billions of people on the planet unless we have human rights to share gracefully the resources of the planet. If the generates local industry, local work and local culture. And because the logistics are an important part of the cost equation, the long-scale logistics will become untenable, so the food wants to be grown locally, and the manufacturing wants to move towards local production. It is a regenerative agenda for industry and human delight on a planetary basis and I think it connects to human rights.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #10. It was written by Pio Barone Lumaga the editor of LOFT The Nordic Bookazine.