Are You Ready For The Green Revolution?

Brian Dumaine /Fortune 10dec01

William McDonough is. This environmental architect wants to radically shake up the world. If he succeeds, business will never be the same.

Bill McDonough has one of the toughest jobs in the country. He sells green ideas to hardened, skeptical executives. A couple of years ago McDonough, who runs a small architecture firm in Charlottesville, Va., was telling a Ford manager that he wanted to put skylights in the roof of the company's River Rouge car plant in Dearborn, Mich. The manager, having had years of experience with leaky skylights, snapped back, "I know all about architects like you. You want to come in and put pretty skylights in factories. Do you know what we do with skylights at River Rouge? We tar them over."

That's just the kind of challenge McDonough loves. He drove the manager to a nearby Herman Miller plant he had designed and went into his green sales rap. This smooth-talking, bow-tied Ivy Leaguer rattled off the advantages of his green designs. The Herman Miller plant lets in lots of natural light and fresh air, the skylights are vertical so they don't leak, and oh, by the way, productivity has increased so much that the Herman Miller factory helps pay for itself. Sold. This was just another minor skirmish in what, to McDonough's mind, is a much bigger war--to win over the business community to a new way of thinking about environmentalism. It won't be easy, because McDonough is no ordinary green crusader. His message: Today's environmental movement, though well-intentioned, is in many ways flawed. And this dapper dresser, who looks a lot like the actor Michael Keaton, isn't at all shy about telling you why.

His philosophy in a nutshell: The current green movement is about efficiency and about reducing the amount of toxins that go into our air, water, and earth. A noble cause, but, as McDonough argues, this approach does nothing more than slow the rate at which we're poisoning ourselves. Says he: "How can something be good if it makes you sick? How can it be good if it destroys the planet? How can it be good if it causes global warming? Is that good design?"

Instead, McDonough proposes a world in which solar and wind energy replace nuclear and fossil fuels, in which natural light and air replace air conditioning, in which safe ingredients replace toxic chemicals in our clothes, homes, offices, and factories. But his world is not one of scarcity, not one of a Jimmy Carter, put-on-your-cardigan, turn-down-the-thermostat kind of malaise.

McDonough celebrates abundance. He believes in passive energy systems that will let you take the longest hot-water shower you could ever want, factories that can grow without polluting the environment, and goods that, when thrown away, become food for other living things or can be cheaply and easily recycled into high-quality products. Here's McDonough on a roll:

Growth is good; ask a tree. A kid grows; that's good. So the argument in commerce about growth and no growth is a stupid argument. Of course you have to grow; nature wants you to grow and businesses want to grow, but if businesses have to grow and environmentalists come along and say your growth is ruining the earth, that's because the growth is not following nature's laws. But what if growth were good? What if that factory purifies water and makes oxygen? That's interesting. And different from "I want less bad versions of what we already have."

Sound utopian? Yes. And at times one is tempted to roll one's eyes at McDonough's unbounded, tree-hugging optimism. Also, carried away by his own enthusiasm, he may at times exaggerate the benefits or practicality of his green philosophy. That said, there's no doubt that he's a supersalesman for the movement. "Bill is the Johnny Appleseed of ecological architecture," says David Orr, the head of environmental studies at Oberlin College and someone who has worked with McDonough.

As McDonough sprinkles his ideas around, some very powerful people in the business world have started to follow his lead. Ford Motor CEO William Ford Jr. has hired McDonough to be chief architect for a ten-year, $ 2 billion redesign of the River Rouge car factory. Ford wants to turn this grimy plant into an environmental showplace. As the deal was signed, Bill Ford hailed McDonough as one of the most "profound environmental thinkers in the world." A few years before that, McDonough persuaded the chairman of Gap to put a grass roof on his San Bruno, Calif., office complex. A grass roof? The grass, argued McDonough, is good for drainage, doesn't need maintenance, and provides UV insulation, and the birds love it too. Phil Knight of Nike hired him to develop running shoes whose soles, when discarded, become food for earthworms. And the list goes on.

Will more of the business community sign on to McDonough's vision? The World Trade Center tragedy makes it all the more likely. As long as America remains dependent on Middle East oil, it will need to be embroiled in the politics of that region. As Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes, "If that dependence is ever to end...we'll have to find a way, through some combination of technological innovation and radical policies, to wean not just the U.S. but the world economy as a whole from its dependence on oil."

And then there are the selfish reasons to become a believer. McDonough has shown that--whether you're a FORTUNE 500 company or a small business--his green buildings can boost productivity and reduce costs. In addition, the green movement will provide huge opportunities for entrepreneurs eager to start new businesses ranging from solar design, recycling, and fuel cells to green construction and landscaping. Says Tim O'Brien, director of Ford's Environmental Quality Office: "This is just the dawn of opportunities for entrepreneurs."

William McDonough & Partners is a 40-person architecture firm located in an old vegetable warehouse in Charlottesville. Founded in 1981, the firm has designed buildings for Gap, Nike, Steelcase, Herman Miller, and Oberlin College. McDonough, who was dean of the architecture school at the University of Virginia from 1994 to 1999, was looking to broaden his green campaign beyond architecture. He hooked up with chemist Michael Braungart, who runs an environmental firm in Germany. Today their two firms cross-fertilize each other: Braungart provides expertise in chemistry and McDonough in design. For instance, working in collaboration, the firms designed environmentally friendly textiles. Making cloth can be a very dirty business, so McDonough and Braungart helped a Swiss company, Rohner Textil, sift through 1,600 chemical dyes before finding 16 that were nontoxic. The company now uses those safe dyes for textiles. When Swiss regulators came to measure the outflow from Rohner's textile mill, they at first thought their instruments were broken. The water flowing out of the mill was as clean as drinking water.

McDonough's unbounded enthusiasm for things green started when his father, the Far East representative for Seagram, moved the family to Hong Kong in the mid-1950s. There, the 6-year-old McDonough had his first run-in with scarcity. Hong Kong was so densely populated that during the dry season his family had to get by with only four gallons of water every four days. Says McDonough: "That's when you really see what happens when you overload the system."

After getting his undergraduate degree in 1973 at Dartmouth, where he developed a passion for photography, McDonough signed on as a junior member of a team entering a contest sponsored by King Hussein of Jordan to create a 100-year housing plan for the Jordan River valley. McDonough's team won by suggesting that the Jordanians design housing based on ancient Bedouin principles. While a Russian team proposed littering the valley with Soviet-style housing blocks, McDonough's team suggested adobe houses that could take advantage of indigenous materials and provide cool shelter from the burning desert.

According to McDonough, if the homes were built of mud, the local people could build and repair them themselves. The huts also have domed roofs so they don't need any tensile structures. In other words, they don't need any trees or steel, which would be expensive and require shipment into the desert. Today the Jordan Valley is littered with adobe huts.

The experience in Jordan became the foundation for McDonough's entire philosophy. But let him tell it.

In Jordan I was sitting in a Bedouin tent, and instead of saying, "Oh, my God, I've gone back centuries to some primitive ways," I saw it as one of the most elegant structures I've ever seen. You've got your factory--goats--following you around and eating what you can't eat and making hair out of that for you. At the same time it gives you meat, milk, and entertainment. And then rejuvenates the soil with its droppings--a full cycle. So it's a solar-energy transformation.

So you take solar income and turn it into goat hair, and turn that into a very rough weave. Now you're in 120-degree heat and there's no wind, there's no shade. And guess what? You're sitting in the tent and saying, "Hey, I'm sitting in deep shade, and the temperature is 95 degrees; that's interesting." And the design of the tent through convection creates a breeze. Now you're in a cool breeze, and the lighting is exquisite because the tent lets in a thousand pins of light. It's magnificent.

So we're going to solve the energy problem because we have income, solar income. But we're not going to solve the mass [fossil fuel] problem because we don't have mass income--the occasional meteorite? The mass of the earth is getting toxified, the soil is getting depleted, and we're cutting down rain forests and losing genetic information. The energy is not the problem, it's the mass. We'll figure out energy because we have the solar income. You can do it.

When his experience in Jordan ended, McDonough enrolled in Yale's architecture school, where he picked up enough knowledge to design the first solar house in Ireland. Then, in 1977, he went to New York City, where he apprenticed for four years at a big firm, Davis Brody, before starting out on his own. His big break came in 1984 when the Environmental Defense Fund asked him to design its headquarters. This building, which ended up having a lot of light, greenery, and fresh air, was the first commercial project to address "sick-building syndrome" head-on. For instance, McDonough improved indoor air quality by using nontoxic building materials for finishes, paints, and even adhesive for the carpets. A lot of what McDonough does is plain common sense:

A while back a newspaper did a piece on me, and the headline was THE LATEST INNOVATION IN OFFICE BUILDINGS: WINDOWS THAT OPEN. I called the reporter up and said this was the low point in Western civilization. Architects say you can't make skyscrapers with windows that open. Of course you can. The Empire State Building has them, the Chrysler Building has them. People have just forgotten how to do it.

After the Environmental Defense Fund project, McDonough worked on a number of small but high-profile projects like the lavish Paul Stuart clothing store on Madison Avenue in New York City, in which all the oak in the suit room comes from replanted American forests. Then, in 1998, Gap Chairman Don Fisher hired him to design the company's corporate campus in San Bruno because he liked his concept of "an undulating meadow of ancient grasses." Today the roof of the San Bruno building has grass and wildflowers growing on it. The interior, lit by walls of glass and decorated with swaths of indoor plants, in many ways resembles an undulating meadow. The place is also 30% more energy efficient than state law requires. Listen to his words:

With the Gap building, we used raised floors through the whole building so we can take the nighttime air, let it flow under the raised floor, and let it cool down the building all night like a tent in Jordan or a hacienda. No one has ever done that in a whole building; it has allowed us to cut back on energy use. Pacific Gas & Electric gave us an award as one of the most energy-efficient buildings in California, and we weren't trying to be efficient--we were trying to be effective. And we did this without minimizing the amount of daylight or fresh air in order to minimize the air conditioning. This is what traditional energy-efficient buildings try to do. But you end up living in the dark with bad air.

Yes, being green is nice, but what's in it for the shareholders? Plenty, if you happen to own stock in Herman Miller. In 1996, McDonough designed a factory and showroom for the office furniture maker in Holland, Mich., that is energy intelligent and bathed in natural light and fresh air. According to Judith Heerwagen, a Seattle-based environmental psychologist, the improved working conditions boosted productivity and strengthened morale. Herman Miller says that it not only saves about $ 35,000 a year on electrical costs but also benefits from reduced turnover and absenteeism.

Ford, too, is saving a lot of green by being green. McDonough's revamping of its 1,100-acre River Rouge production site, where Henry Ford started making his Model T's 85 years ago, isn't just some philanthropic project; it has to make financial sense. Consider the one-million-square-foot assembly plant that's under construction, where Ford plans to make F-150 trucks. Originally the company was going to build a traditional (and expensive) water drainage and purification system to keep pollutants from being washed into the river during rainstorms. But McDonough had a better idea: Why not let nature do the work, and save money along the way?

As McDonough explains:

Most factories are designed today so that if you get a one-inch rainfall, it hits the roof and rushes down the gutters into big pipes and into the river as fast as possible. The runoff picks up all the particulates that may have dropped on the site--everything in the soil, the detritus, the harmful chemicals. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could make the water travel from the building to the river in three days rather than three minutes? Then you avoid flooding and the dangerous water. Then we said, "What if we used the grass roof of the Ford assembly plant to absorb water and make oxygen?" The water that does run off falls onto a porous paving in the parking lot, so the water is absorbed, and it's filtered through wetlands with native habitat on the way back to the river.

"Here's what's exciting to the shareholders at Ford. We priced this out at $ 13 million. If Ford had used conventional engineering, it would have cost the company $ 48 million to build a chemical-treatment facility because the system would have to handle millions of gallons a minute. And the regulators loved this new system because there was nothing to regulate. You have to regulate what comes out at the end. What comes out here? A trickle that's clean.

When you hear McDonough espouse his green ideas, many of them seem so simple and so economical it makes one wonder why they're not being adopted more quickly. The answer is that the ideas are radical, and most people need to be educated--if not dragged kicking and screaming--before they're willing to accept anything new.

Just ask David Orr, Oberlin's head of environmental studies, who hired McDonough to design the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies. The just-completed building is one of the most advanced green buildings in the country. Its graceful curved roof has 17,000 square feet of photovoltaic cells to generate electricity, and the building has geothermal wells for heat. The interior, bathed in warm natural light, uses wood only from replanted forests, and the grounds consist of native plants so no harmful pesticides or fertilizers need be used. The building even has a "living machine" made of plants that cleans and recycles all its wastewater.

However, Orr says that the $ 7.5 million project, which he considers a success, was much harder to pull off than it should have been. "Green design isn't taking regular architecture and doing cute add-ons. It's a whole different thing. You're trying to see the building as a system where everything has to work together. And institutions and businesses are not set up yet to handle the transition." For instance, because of some misunderstandings between McDonough's firm and the local engineers, the geothermal wells are not yet connected, and an energy-hungry electric heater and fan was installed to provide warmth in the winter. Not very green.

And some people at Oberlin aren't making it easy for Orr to go forward with his green projects. One faculty member has made it his mission to denounce the building. Why? For one, McDonough seems to have overpromised. He sold the building as a net generator of energy. In other words, it would, thanks to the geothermal wells and photovoltaics, generate more power than it consumed. Well, so far that has not been the case.

It will take time and a lot of education before McDonough's vision of the world becomes more widely accepted. That doesn't seem to bother him. His small firm has more work than it can handle. And for those people who are too stubborn to see the world McDonough's way? He calls them mules. "We don't really worry about them," he says. "They'll only be around for one generation, because, like mules, they're sterile."