He believes the world needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up, in
a "next industrial revolution." That means everything from
products to buildings to cities to "definitions of beauty" and
constructs of the human mind. Beauty, he says, embodies
function. A beautiful woman who harms you is not beautiful; a
beautiful building that spews fumes and spreads cancer is not
beautiful. "How do we love all children?" means "How can we look
seven generations into the future if we leave behind the
detritus of this designer society?" "For a strategy of change,"
he says, "we need a strategy of hope."
The truth is that McDonough isn't an architect at all, or is
only occasionally an architect. In collaboration with his friend
German chemist Michael Braungart, he has begun or completed
designs for nontoxic shower gels, fabrics that do not contain
mutagens or carcinogens, dolls made without PVCs, biodegradable
yogurt cartons, and a recyclable Nike sneaker made with soles
that, when they disintegrate, will serve as nutrients for the
soil. Among the larger projects, besides the Gap building, are
the Nike European Headquarters, an environmental-studies center
at Oberlin College that will produce more energy than it
consumes, the Monsanto Child Development Center in Missouri, and
a new community in Indiana called Coffee Creek Center, which
will work against suburban sprawl by establishing a compact and
pleasant small town.
"In Oberlin, we asked, How can we design a building like a
tree?--a fecund structure that purifies waters and makes oxygen
and food," he says. "In Coffee Creek, we asked, What if a town
were like a forest?" He envisions the Indiana project as the
first step toward creating "a green world with connecting gray
zones."
The caution here is one that applies to utopian visions
generally: perfect is always imperfect, as it must be, and
imperfect--a world of disappointments and surprises--is as good
as it gets. It is hard to know whether McDonough recognizes
this. He is in the first blush of success, where he wants
everything to be right and believes it is possible. He asks,
"Why should it ever be necessary to tear the Gap complex down?"
and thinks that the question is rhetorical.
We walk through the building's halls and hear no noise anywhere.
The colors surrounding us are muted tones; everything has the
feel of khaki, even the fluorescent indirect lighting that
McDonough deliberately made warm "to make people look better to
one another." Walls display some of the art collection of Donald
G. Fisher, Gap's founder and board chairman. And there are
small, tidy visual jokes played against the pervasive serenity.
One of Fisher's paintings spells out the word RIOT at the
farthest end of the hallway. The F was left off the sign on the
vault of a fire valve, which now reads, IRE VALVE.
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