When architectural firms began to compete for the Gap Inc. office complex in San Bruno, Calif., William McDonough saw it as a competition of ideas rather than for a contract. "Our idea," he says, "was that if a bird flew over the building, it would not know that anything had changed." If that sounds like pure eco-nut talk (I almost resist noting that McDonough is for the birds), try the question he puts to potential clients when he undertakes any of his architectural projects: "I ask, 'How do we love all children, all species, all time?'"
Upon hearing him say that, one is tempted to go for a pistol, but after a day of McDonough's instruction in much more than architecture, one sees that his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that--in demonstrable and practical ways--is changing the design of the world. McDonough empathizes with birds because he's a rare one himself, a visionary--half green, half pink--who talks like a communist, thinks like a plutocrat and acts like an ecologist. Indeed, the three points of his abstractly designed universe (he is given to drawing incomprehensible diagrams on any available surface) reflect that people who used to be impelled to make things by the old impulses of social and economic interests now must add the environment. "But not as an ism," he cautions, not as an extreme. "What we're trying to do is balance ecology, equity and economy."
The Gap campus, which William McDonough+Partners completed in 1997, is an anomaly of a building that looks more beautiful in life than it does in photos, and seems to expand its beauty from the inside out. The inside is essentially the outside, so when one is there, one is also somewhere else. The "facts" of the structure read like an essay on "What I Did for the Environment Last Summer": the roofs are planted with native grasses and wildflowers atop 6 in. of soil that both fools the birds and serves as a thermal and acoustical insulator. San Bruno is a stone's throw from San Francisco's airport, yet planes flying low overhead create barely a buzz.
The complex's wood floors and veneer were harvested from sustainable forests. Not a single California live oak was cut down during construction, and a stand of the ancient trees rises in a dark elegance just beyond a piazza. Huge atriums carry daylight deep into the building, paints and adhesives are low toxicity, the place is 30% more energy efficient than state law requires, and so on.
But the special power of the structure is its palpable connection to the people who work there. On the day that McDonough and I visit, 600 employees go about their tasks, yet the building feels empty. The windows bring people to the sky. "When it's a nice day," says McDonough, "why feel as if you've missed it?" Stand in practically any spot, and one can see the greenery of the outside trees, the grassy lower roof or the grasses growing in one of the two interior courtyards. Light is everywhere. It fills the vast open hallways that seem to stretch on forever under ceilings 15 ft. high. McDonough says, "People have lofty thoughts in lofty places."