Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough

By: Danielle SacksMon Oct 13, 2008 at 5:45 PM

McDonough at his Charlottesville, Virginia, offices | photograph by Martien Mulder

Green architect William McDonough has been hailed as a water-walking visionary. The truth is far more complicated.

Today, McDonough charges some $50,000 a speech. He's a regular at thought-leadership conferences like TED, the Clinton Global Initiative, and Google Zeitgeist, where he networks with entrepreneurs and politicians, cementing his role in history. He and Brad Pitt cofounded a New Orleans nonprofit and are recruiting architects to help rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward. In May, Vanity Fair, in an adulatory seven-page profile, crowned him "a prophet of the sustainability and clean-technology movements."

"This is how my life works," McDonough says, aglow at his good fortune.

Charlottesville is no Hollywood, no Davos, not even an Iceland. Although the Green Dean is no more, McDonough still calls the small college town home. Housed in a lemon-yellow building that looks more dentist office than toxicity-testing chamber, MBDC is marked by a laminated computer printout tacked to the door. A few blocks away, I meet McDonough at McDonough Consulting, upstairs from his architecture firm, which is now working with NASA to build an office that "operates like an organism" and with Google to make its Mountain View, California, Googleplex more sustainable. As he walks toward me dressed in his signature all-black ensemble, he has a vaporous quality about him, like a mirage coalescing on the spot. The grin on his face recalls what others have told me: You are honored to be in his presence -- and he knows it.

McDonough waves me over toward a wall adorned with a few framed photos, including one of him shaking hands with a Chinese official. "If you gave her a cigarette and shaved her head, she would look just like her dad," he laughs. The official is Deng Nan, Deng Xiaoping's daughter and McDonough's cochair at the China -- U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. In the photo, as he has told many packed conference halls, Deng Nan had just signed a memorandum for China to adopt cradle to cradle. Then McDonough points to a rendering he created of an ecologically correct Chinese city. It is a utopian image of a skyline that looks more like a sugarcane field, he says, with lush foliage in place of conventional roofs. A mother and son are farming on one. "That's what's so great about having an architecture firm," he says. "We can render ideas visible -- it's really fun."

McDonough's office is accented with his own creations: Herman Miller's first cradle-to-cradle-certified chair, the Mirra; Shaw Industries' PVC-free EcoWorx "A Walk in the Garden" carpet; Steelcase's 100% biodegradable nontoxic Climatex fabric. "If you look at most of the people in the environmental movement who talk about the environment, they're telling other people's stories," he says. But what's so compelling about his stories, he adds, is that "I actually create the stories by doing the work. I am telling my own stories." He cites Oberlin College's Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies -- "a building like a tree" -- as a quintessential example. "I made this building. It creates more energy than it needs to operate. That's a great story!" McDonough knows that the more his stories are retold, the more permanent they become.

As someone who believes that "commerce is the engine of change," as he puts it, McDonough has never confined his ambition to the high plains of principle. The virtue of his cradle-to-cradle idea is that it offers a virtuous result -- infinite abundance with no waste -- through an unabashedly commercial channel, namely manufacturing. If he could establish himself in that chain as the arbiter of clean products, there is no limit to what it might yield -- for everyone. "The faster and larger our business grows," he told me, "the better the world gets."

McDonough has struggled, however, to grow that business. He has dabbled with various models in his hope of making cradle to cradle take off. There was the "Ralph Lauren of sustainability" model, in which McDonough would design product lines and become a multimedia personality (abandoned three years ago, after he realized that "really changing the compass of global society is going to require more than a brand"). Then he and Braungart considered selling MBDC to a larger consultancy, only to realize that would mean handing over the intellectual property, a loss of control he couldn't tolerate. Then there was the nonprofit model, which, McDonough tells me, he has studied and "hasn't worked."

McDonough did begin taking steps several years ago to formalize cradle to cradle as an official certification, essentially a LEED-style rating system for product design. He developed 35 criteria -- from toxicity to renewable power to social fairness -- and began charging companies between $5,000 and $20,000 per certification. Every time he certifies a product, whether as simple as a diaper or as complex as a new office cubicle, he records each of its ingredients' "cradle to cradleness" in a master database. Ultimately, his plan is for the data to become a sort of Human Genome Project for chemicals.