(3 of 4)
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.
In some offices silence is eerie or disturbing. Here it feels more like a city early on a Sunday summer morning; one is aware of activity in the wings but not distracted by it. An employee's life remains private, behind low walls, where one is almost compelled to make a mess; everything else in the building is so starkly clean.
The sense of privacy is oddly retained in the open spaces as well--like the mobile anonymity cities offer. The outdoor feeling is abetted by the ability of employees to control their own lighting by raising or lowering tall shades manually. And the air they breathe is fresh. The raised floors act like a network of ducts, and the ventilation system pulls in a cool breeze each night, almost eliminating the need for air conditioning. We pass workers whom I stop to ask if they hate working in such a dump. They are politely amused by the question but are authentically eager to say how much they love the building. Most of them do not go out for lunch, because the cafeteria is good and because in is out. "The old idea between employers and employees," says McDonough, "was that it was necessary to put you under stress to perform. A sort of Darwinian model: Shape up, or you have no value. We assume that people have value and that this is the atmosphere where it will shine."
"Could you have done your best work in this building?" I ask.
"Absolutely," he says. "It's like an architect's studio."
Toward the end of the day, we are seated at a table in a corner of an open space that looks over the lower grassy roof. We might as well have been sitting beside a prairie. He talks of how he graduated to his way of thinking, but the process is not very clear, to him or to me. He was headed for the conventional life of architecture, and then he wasn't. There was Dartmouth, Yale school of architecture, a first job, then dreams. Driven basically by a mystical sensibility, he prefers to explain himself by referring to his roots. Whatever drives him, he believes, originated in the Irish mists.
So he speaks of misty ancient Irish history and folklore. He tells me the kings sent their princes to live with the poets by the rivers, and the poets would teach the princes their songs. But the prince who finally got selected as king would be the one who ate "the salmon of all knowledge"--so called because the salmon was the animal that migrated west to east and knew how to get back to the exact place where it was born.
"I feel that it is time for us who have been out there to get back and re-examine our origins," he says. "I feel like a salmon coming home."
"Does the old Irish melancholy go along with that?" I ask him.
"Not for me," he says. "I'm basically optimistic. I'm trying to reimagine the future."