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A walking college lecture--he is also dean of the University of Virginia school of architecture--McDonough is a compendium of similar maxims, phrases and rules: "Honor commerce as the engine of change"; "respect diversity"; "build for abundance"; "eco-efficiency should be replaced by eco-effectiveness"; "design is the first signal of human intention"; "all sustainability, like politics, is local"; "I want to do architecture that is timeless and mindful."
All this and much more come from a 48-year-old innocent anarchist; his language has the touch of the poet and of the bomb thrower; he looks like actor James Woods in a bow tie. He thinks abstractly, making it equally fascinating and difficult to talk to him, since he turns nearly every contribution one makes to the conversation into a refinement of his theories.
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.