Building for Tomorrow by Sean Koenig photos courtesy of the the Architecture School A carpet factory with effluent cleaner than tap water, a hospital that produces no waste, a town that runs entirely on current solar income. You have entered the mind of the university's revolutionary William McDonough. McDonough's talents seem boundless. He published an essay on wealth disparity in the Harvard Business Review, delivered the Centennial Sermon at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and hosted the PBS special "Planet Neighborhood" last September. In "The Hannover Principles," he expounds the design principles to be used at the World's Fair in 2000, and last April he founded the Institute for Sustainable Design (ISD) at U.Va. to extends his ideas into academia. And all this without beginning to consider his architectural accomplishments, for which he received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the nation's highest environmental accolade. His vision of sustainable design, "minimizing human impact on the environment by modeling design on the elegance and efficiency of natural systems," has infiltrated the business world and the environmental movement. But what about U.Va.? I asked him. What do you see as U.Va.'s main environmental impact? That's a multi-layered question; our primary impact here is in our education. I would think that if there is anything we could do in terms of our ambition, it would be to strive for an ability to create mindfulness rather than mindlessness. The role of education is to fill minds in some fecund process, to create hope and intelligence. Our principle legacy will be this mindfulness we create. In terms of our relation to the environment, I don't think our society in general has had a mindfulness about our relation to the environment, whether we sit in a classroom that has no windows -- Do you feel the classrooms at U.Va. meet your design standards? Well, I think they are a residue of conventional design, and in that sense they're no better or worse than others, except to the extent the older buildings, certainly, have a lot of tall windows letting in daylight, which is nice. I wouldn't admonish this university more than any other, I just think there is an opportunity now to stop fighting, and that this university has an opportunity to lead in this way. The signals are good -- we have a very intelligent administration, a very mindful group of people. It portends well for the future -- we had a luncheon at the Pavilion this past weekend with Amy Aubend, sort of the national energy guru, and it was a wonderful event with waste management and a representative from the engineering school. It's exciting to watch all this happen. You discussed in the class you teach, Environmental Choices, how the original buildings on Grounds were built from local materials. Do we still incorporate enough local materials here at U.Va.? I don't think it's part of our awareness, but I think we could and should. In this area, building with brick makes a lot of sense because we're sitting on a mountain of clay. So brick is a perfectly natural and appropriate material for building in this part of the world. You seem to interact a lot with students in your role as Town Crier and through teaching ­ why is that important to you? I think that the closer communication can be to the physical relationship, the more meaningful it is in the long run. I find that if I can get up and stand on a desk and yell, I can immediately talk to 250 people who can talk to another 250 people, whereas if I sent an email message around, it doesn't have the richness of experience. ___________________________________________ McDonough directs many projects with varying degrees of importance to the university; his most ambitious program is the Institute for Sustainable Design, where he serves as Creative Director. The Institute was founded last April to "integrate McDonough's principles into an academic setting" according to Coordinator Kristan Mitchell. ISD programs range from sustainable classroom renovations to the Piedmont Initiative, a regional planning look at the future or Virginia's heartland. Look for "more of a physical presence at the university" for the ISD following an expansion into the basement of Madison House this spring. McDonough continues to stay active in the architecture business as well. He founded the McDonough + Partners architecture firm in New York in 1981. Following his appointment as Architecture Dean at U.Va. in 1994, he moved the company to Charlottesville and continued to serve as its "conceptualization force." Public Relations director Charles Rosenblum explained how McDonough's "ecological considerations underlie every aspect" of the firm's design decisions. Do McDonough's obligations at U.Va. conflict with his obligations to the company? "Yes, but through the miracle of the cellular phone his presence here is continuous." Right now, McDonough's 35-person firm is putting the finishing touches on the Environmental Science building (pictured above) at Oberlin College. This flagship project marks the first time McDonough + Company have designed a structure that will be a net exporter of energy. The solar power collected by the building with photovoltaic cells and windows should exceed all the department's energy needs. As Dean, McDonough has supported an interdisciplinary focus in the architecture school, and supervised the expansion of Stevens Hall following his design principles. How does McDonough manage to accomplish so much? He explained it best himself. photos courtesy of the the Architecture School Eric Rymshaw has remarked that you "practice what you preach." How have you incorporated sustainable design into your own life? I'm just a normal person. For years I never had a television set -- I do now. Now that I did a TV show, the idea was I needed a TV set to watch the tapes of it. The funny part is that my three-and-a-half-year-old son thinks that all there is on television is Daddy or home videos since we don't watch TV. I like composting -- I try to compost as much as I can. I try to tread lightly. I like to celebrate abundance. I try to create an abundance of time with my family, an abundance of goodwill, and on the material side we live modestly. Clearly you have expanded beyond just architecture -- how have you prepared yourself to be a designer? Well, I work at the level from the molecule to the region; we're now designing packaging, fabrics, carpets, transportation systems, buildings, towns, at my firm which I operate here autonomously. At the university, the idea of integrating design beyond the obvious architectural design has been a tradition here too. The architecture school is unique to have four departments under one roof. We have history, landscape, urban architectural planning ... What we are starting to see are interdisciplinary studios, interdisciplinary work; what I'm trying to do with my Institute for Sustainable Design is to even broaden that, to pick up environmental studies, law, medicine, nursing, engineering and so on. We're going to design at the molecular level with the medical school and nursing school with our sustainable hospital initiative. Looking at all the packaging and how that can be used to make energy and not cancer. We're looking at regional initiatives, the Piedmont initiative -- we're looking at the design of life itself. The University of Virginia will be the place where the International Conference on the Ethics of Genetic Engineering will be held, under the auspices of the Institute for Sustainable Design. I asked the Chairman of the Board of the Monsanto Corporation to invite the chairs of all the other biotechnology companies to come here to meet with the ISD and the Hamburg Environmental Institute in Germany to craft the code of responsible care for genetic engineering. There is no common code of ethics in the industry, I can assure you. Imagine, designing at the level of the design of life itself. ____________________________________________ Many people dismiss McDonough as the man with the monorail idea, or "the Green Dean." McDonough's vision is so novel and accessible, however, that students owe it to themselves to learn more. I walked into his office while his secretary was scheduling appointments in September, and between a plane fight from California and a luncheon McDonough found time for me. When I failed to find a plug for the tape recorder I had brought with me, McDonough crawled under his desk to locate the outlet. McDonough will change the course of this university; he has opened the door for us to carry his message into the world as well. ____________________________________________ In the future, do you see settlement patterns going "back to nature," living closer to the earth, or reinhabiting degraded areas through "in-fill" movements? I'm very into a restorative agenda. We have to create an agenda that is no longer depletive, but actually restorative. That immediately begins to send signals about working in places that are degraded and restoring them to life, so that our prosperity gets measured by our legacy of fecundity and not by structures. What is your legacy? I think my legacies will be "The Hannover Principles," the Declaration of Interdependence (if you want to run parallels to Jefferson's tombstone) and the students who have enjoyed this strategy of hope. If you could teach U.Va. students one concept or have them read one book, what would it be? It would vary day by day, but one book is An Agricultural Testament by Sir Albert Howard. And the reason would be to understand our hubris. Howard was an agronomist sent by the British to India to teach the Indian people western agriculture. So it was the imperialist science coming in to India and telling them "here is how to do agriculture"-- using fertilizers and that sort of thing. And when he got there he observed how the native people were using their cows and their straw and how they were restoring the soil constantly through composting and over time what he recognized is that they knew more about agriculture than he did. So to see someone coming from this Western tradition, having an imperial hubris, develop this humility and begin to understand these natural cycles that were being worked in a way that was attuned to the culture and the life, and then became the great proponent of organic agriculture. This is what started the whole organic agriculture movement in this country. It all traces back to Sir Albert Howard. To see a Western mind reflect upon an ancient tradition, reconnect to the living systems in this fecund way and then realize there is a whole revolution to look back at nature as a model and a mentor for our systems ... it really is an astonishing example, one of the most important books in the history of the world. How can students get involved? Check in with the ISD and tell them that you want to plug-in and take Environmental Choices. It's there to look at all these issues from a complex perspective to help create a strategy of hope. You get both the theory and the practice, and you can decide how to apply it to your life. And I encourage composting.

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