THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 19, 1996 TAG: 9602170069
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Profile
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long : 149 lines
DESIGNING THE FIRST solar home in Ireland as a 23-year-old graduate student at Yale was just a start. William A. McDonough, now the dean of architecture at the University of Virginia, is thinking bigger these days.
A lot bigger.
Without batting an eye, McDonough talks matter-of-factly about changing the industrialized world - the whole western world. No more pollution. No more toxic chemicals. No more environmental regulations. No kidding.
``What's going on is a revolution,'' he says with a disarming confidence one recent afternoon at his campus office. ``Two years from now, people will turn around and say, `What happened?' ''
McDonough, 44, is becoming a leading voice among a growing number of environmental scientists, engineers, academics, entrepreneurs and, of course, architects, who believe their work is pushing society to the cusp of a second industrial revolution.
Known as ``sustainable development'' or ``industrial ecology,'' the movement is rooted in the advance of clean technologies that produce quality goods and jobs without smothering Mother Nature under a blanket of fossil fuels, smoke and hazardous wastes.
But McDonough is proudly more radical than many of his contemporaries, who include Vice President Al Gore, author of a best-selling book on the coming environmental age. While some colleagues accept a small amount of waste and ecological damage, the ``Green Dean,'' as McDonough is playfully known on campus, believes the only goals worth setting are zero pollution and total recycling.
``A company that reduces its toxic pollution by 80 percent is still a toxic polluter,'' he says. ``We're still designing our cars, our ships and our factories to put oil in the boiler and smoke into the sky. We need a completely new design.''
McDonough points to a little square sample of cloth sitting on his desk. This, he says, would be an ideal material for the flag of the new era.
The cloth, which he and a German chemist designed, contains no harmful dyes, no toxins, nothing that would make someone sick. Its primary component is fiber from a plant found in the Philippines.
Completely biodegradable, the material introduces a new concept to fashion: fertilizer clothing. ``You could wear a shirt made of this, and when you're done, throw it away on your compost pile,'' he says. ``There'd be no waste. It goes back to the Earth.''
Manufactured at a Swiss fabric mill, the material is being sold mostly as furniture cover. But McDonough is teaming up with several fashion designers to create a line of clothing.
Elizabeth Meyer, an associate professor of landscape architecture at U.Va. who chaired a search committee that chose McDonough in 1994, said she has been impressed by his ability to bring meaning and zest to the technical issues of their staid science.
To wit: After a speech before the Virginia Garden Club last year in Williamsburg, an elderly woman raised her hand and asked McDonough if he would be interested in running for governor. He smiled, but said he would leave politics to the memory of another activist architect from Charlottesville - Thomas Jefferson.
McDonough relishes walking in the footsteps of one of his idols and enjoys the off-hand comparisons to Jefferson and his prolific world of ideas. (He also half-jokes that one of his favorite perks as dean is that he gets to live in a Jefferson-designed home on U.Va.'s famous Lawn.)
To some political conservatives and industry groups, however, sustainable development is just liberal jargon meaning more government control of business.
In literature from groups lobbying Congress for relaxed environmental rules, the concept is dismissed and mistrusted. Its axiom that nature is endangered is flatly rejected. Groups sardonically note that the environment has recovered throughout history from far worse injury than pollution - namely, volcanoes, ice ages, continental shifts and earthquakes.
``The claim that the Earth cannot support the life it spawns is perhaps the most arrogant assertion of pseudo-knowledge than can be expressed by a human,'' writes the property-rights group Environmental Conservation Organization in its national newsletter.
McDonough chuckles at such criticism. ``I'm the most conservative person you'll meet,'' he says. ``I don't believe in government control either. It doesn't work.''
He especially likes what the Dutch government asked of its industries in 1990. Faced with mounting environmental problems after years of heavy-handed regulation, government officials offered industrial leaders a deal: Find a way to stop polluting and we'll stop bothering you.
``Aren't regulations really the legalization to kill something slowly?'' McDonough asks. ``What we seem to be saying is, if you're going to pollute a river, do it slowly. It's ridiculous.''
Such words may sound strange coming from an architect, a profession more commonly associated with sterile drafting tables and debates over adequate parking space. But McDonough has never filled the role of a stereotype.
Born in Japan, McDonough was raised in the Far East and Canada, and moved 19 times with his family before attending college as a shy undergraduate at Dartmouth. As he says, ``I was an observer of the world.''
His environmental thinking stems from his collegiate days during the Energy Crisis of the 1970s. Jimmy Carter was president, gas lines extended for blocks and America seemed to be losing its identity because of a group of oil ministers.
``I started trying to think of a way around a problem that no one seemed able to solve,'' he remembers.
He hasn't stopped thinking.
On a recent visit to Charlottesville, McDonough could be seen walking across campus in a colonial-era cape and a canvas bush hat that made him look like a cross between Jack the Ripper and Crocodile Dundee.
On this day he was accompanied by a Native American faithkeeper dressed in black named Orem Lyons. McDonough had flown Lyons down from upstate New York to lecture to his architecture class on, among other subjects, the concept of the Seventh Generation.
This theory suggests that leaders should plan and build their communities thinking seven generations ahead. As McDonough likes to point out, the current generation of Americans is the seventh generation since Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers declared independence from England.
``Natural law prevails,'' Lyons told the class. ``You can't fight nature, you can't change it. You have to recognize it and work with it.''
That is McDonough's mantra in a nutshell. It can be seen in all of his work. Consider McDonough's list of past and current clients, which are as diverse and eclectic as his beloved collection of bow ties:
An Indian tribe in South Dakota, where he is helping the Ogala Lakota people build environmentally self-sufficient buildings.
The White House, where he is participating in the ``Greening of the White House'' project by making the president's residence and the adjacent Old Executive Office more energy efficient.
The Gap in northern California, where he is designing a new corporate headquarters that includes solar panels and a roof made partly of sod that will be planted with trees and native vegetation. Construction starts this spring.
Wal-Mart in Lawrence, Kan., where he helped build the first ``Eco-Mart,'' complete with solar heating, a recycling center and sensor-controlled ventilation designed to save energy.
Keith Morris, a Wal-Mart spokesman, said the project cost about 10 percent more than a traditional store but has paid for itself through lower electricity bills in three years of operation.
The project was satirized by Gary Trudeau in his ``Doonesbury'' comic strip. The cartoonist depicted ``Eco-Mart'' as a public-relations stunt intended to aid Wal-Mart's negative image of putting mom-and-pop stores out of business in small-town America.
McDonough says the job was a great opportunity for his architecture firm and as a real-life test for his green designs.
``I'm not `for' or `against' any constituency,'' he says. ``I'm only looking for a win-win situation.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
HUY NGUYEN
The Virginian-Pilot
William A. McDonough
KEYWORDS: ENVIRONMENT by CNB