A CENTENNIAL SERMON

DESIGN, ECOLOGY, ETHICSAND THE

MAKING OF THINGS

BY

WILLIAM MCDONOUGH

THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINENEW YORK, NEW YORK

FEBRUARY 7, 1993

Saving truth...the truth that saves.This is what sermons are supposed to be about.

What an appropriate honor to have the architectBill McDonough preach the truth for the twenty first

century at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Let all who have ears hear!

The Very Reverend James Parks MortonDean

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It is humbling to be an architect in a ca-thedral because it is a magnificent representa-tion of humankind’s highest aspirations. Itsdimension is illustrated by the small Christfigure in the western rose window, which is,in fact, human scale. A cathedral is a repre-sentation of both our longings and intentions.This morning, here at this important crossingin this great building, I am going to speakabout the concept of design itself as the firstsignal of human intention and will focus onecology, ethics, and the making of things. Iwould like to reconsider both our design andour intentions.

When Vincent Scully gave a eulogy for thegreat architect Louis Kahn, he described a daywhen both were crossing Red Square, where-upon Scully excitedly turned to Kahn andsaid, “Isn’t it wonderful the way the domes ofSt. Basil’s Cathedral reach up into the sky?”Kahn looked up and down thoughtfully for amoment and said, “Isn’t it beautiful the waythey come down to the ground?”

If we understand that design leads to themanifestation of human intention and ifwhat we make with our hands is to be sacredand honor the earth that gives us life, thenthe things we make must not only rise fromthe ground but return to it, soil to soil, waterto water, so everything that is received fromthe earth can be freely given back withoutcausing harm to any living system. This is ecol-ogy. This is good design. It is of this we mustnow speak.

If we use the study of architecture to in-form this discourse, and we go back in history,we will see that architects are always workingwith two elements, mass and membrane. Wehave the walls of Jericho, mass, and we havetents, membranes. Ancient peoples practicedthe art and wisdom of building with mass,such as an adobe-walled hut, to anticipate thescope and direction of sunshine. They knewhow thick a wall needed to be to transfer theheat of the day into the winter night, andhow thick it had to be to transfer the coolness

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into the interior in the summer. They workedwell with what we call “capacity” in the walls interms of storage and thermal lags. They workedwith resistance, straw, in the roof to protect fromheat loss in the winter and to shield the heatgain in summer from the high sun. These werevery sensible buildings within the climate inwhich they are located.

With respect to membrane, we only have tolook at the Bedouin tent to find a design that ac-complishes five things at once. In the desert, tem-peratures often exceed 120 degrees. There is noshade, no air movement. The black Bedouin tent,when pitched, creates a deep shade that bringsone’s sensible temperature down to 95 degrees.The tent has a very coarse weave, which creates abeautifully illuminated interior, having a millionlight fixtures. Because of the coarse weave andthe black surface, the air inside rises and is drawnthrough the membrane. So now you have abreeze coming in from outside, and that drops thesensible temperature even lower, down to 90 de-grees. You may wonder what happens when itrains, with those holes in the tent. The fibersswell up and the tent gets tight as a drum whenwet. And of course, you can roll it up and take itwith you. The modern tent pales by comparison tothis astonishingly elegant construct.

Throughout history, you find constant experi-mentation between mass and membrane. This ca-thedral is a Gothic experiment intregrating greatlight into massive membrane. The challenge hasalways been, in a certain level, how to combinelight with mass and air. This experiment dis-played itself powerfully in modern architecture,which arrived with the advent of inexpensiveglass. It was unfortunate that at the same timethe large sheet of glass showed up, the era ofcheap energy was ushered in, too. And because ofthat, architects no longer rely upon the sun forheat or illumination. I have spoken to thousandsof architects, and when I ask the question, “Howmany of you know how to find true south?”, Irarely get a raised hand.

Our culture has adopted a design stratagemthat essentially says that if brute force or massive

amounts of energy don’t work, you’re not usingenough of it. We made glass buildings that aremore about buildings than they are about people.We’ve used the glass ironically. The hope thatglass would connect us to the outdoors was com-pletely stultified by making the buildings sealed.We have created stress in people because we aremeant to be connected with the outdoors, but in-stead we are trapped. Indoor air quality issuesare now becoming very serious. People are sensinghow horrifying it can be to be trapped indoors, es-pecially with the thousands upon thousands ofchemicals that are being used to make things to-day.

Le Corbusier said in the early part of thiscentury that a house is a machine for living in.He glorified the steamship, the airplane, thegrain elevator. Think about it: a house is a ma-chine for living in. An office is a machme forworking in. A cathedral is a machine for prayingin. This has become a terrifying prospect, becausewhat has happened is that designers are nowdesignmg for the machine and not for people .People talk about solar heating a building, evenabout solar heating a cathedral. But it isn’t thecathedral that is asking to be heated, it is thepeople. To solar-heat a cathedral, one shouldheat people’s feet, not the air 120 feet abovethem. We need to listen to biologist John Todd’sidea that we need to work with living ma-chines, not machines for living in. The focusshould be on people’s needs, and we need cleanwater, safe materials, and durability. And weneed to work from current solar income.

There are certain fundamental laws that areinherent to the natural world that we can use asmodels and mentors for human designs. Ecologycomes from the Greek roots Oikos and Logos,“household” and “logical discourse.” Thus, it isappropriate, if not imperative, for architects todiscourse about the logic of our earth household.To do so, we must first look at our planet andthe very processes by which it manifests life, be-cause therein lie the logical principles withwhich we must work. And we must also con-sider economy in the true sense of the word. Us-

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ing the Greek words Oikos and Nomos, wespeak of natural law and how we measureand manage the relationships within thishousehold, working with the principles ourdiscourse has revealed to us.

And how do we measure our work underthose laws? Does it make sense to measure itby the paper currency that you have in yourwallet? Does it make sense to measure it by agrand summation called GNP? For if we do,we find that the foundering and rupture ofthe Exxon Valdez tanker was a prosperousevent because so much money was spent inPrince William Sound during the clean-up.What then are we really measuring? If wehave not put natural resources on the assetside of the ledger, then where are they? Doesa forest really become more valuable when itis cut down? Do we really prosper when wildsalmon are completely removed from a river?

There are three defining characteristicsthat we can learn from natural design. Thefirst characteristic is that everything we haveto work with is already here—the stones,the clay, the wood, the water, the air. Allmaterials given to us by nature are con-stantly returned to the earth, without eventhe concept of waste as we understand it.Everything is cycled constantly with allwaste equaling food for other living systems.

The second characteristic is that onething allowing nature to continually cycle it-self through life is energy, and this energycomes from outside the system in the form ofperpetual solar income. Not only does natureoperate on “current income,” it does notmine or extract energy from the past, it doesnot use its capital reserves, and it does notborrow from the future. It is an extraordi-narily complex and efficient system for creat-ing and cycling nutrients, so economical thatmodern methods of manufacturing pale incomparison to the elegance of natural systemsof production.

Finally, the characteristic that sustains thiscomplex and efficient system of metabolism

and creation is biodiversity. What preventsliving systems from runnmg down and veer-ing into chaos is a miraculously intricate andsymbiotic relationship between millions of or-ganisms, no two of which are alike.

As a designer of buildings, things, and sys-tems, I ask myself how to apply these threecharacteristics of living systems to my work.How do I employ the concept of waste equalsfood, of current solar income, of protectingbiodiversity in design? Before I can even applythese principles, though, we must understandthe role of the designer in human affairs.

In thinking about this, I reflect upon acommentary of Emerson’s . In the 1830’s,when his wife died, he went to Europe on asailboat and returned in a steamship. He re-marked on the return voyage that he missedthe “Aeolian connection.” If we abstract this,he went over on a solar-powered recyclablevehicle operated by craftspersons, working inthe open air, practicing ancient arts. He re-turned in a steel rust bucket, spilling oil onthe water and smoke into the sky, operated bypeople in a black dungeon shoveling coal intothe mouth of a boiler. Both ships are objects ofdesign. Both are manifestaaons of our humanintention.

Peter Senge, a professor at M.I.T.’s SloanSchool of Management, works with a pro-gram called the Learning Laboratory wherehe studies and discusses how organizationslearn. Within that he has a leadershiplaboratory, and one of the first questions heasks CEO’s of companies that attend is,“Who is the leader on a ship crossing theocean?” He gets obvious answers, such asthe captain, the navigator, or the helms-man. But the answer is none of the above.The leader is the designer of the ship be-cause operations on a ship are a consequenceof design, which is the result of human in-tention. Today, we are still designingsteamships, machines powered by fossil fuelsthat have deleterious effects. We need anew design.

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I grew up in the Far East, and when I cameto this country, I was taken aback when I real-ized that we were not people with lives inAmerica, but consumers with lifestyles. I wantedto ask someone: when did America stop havingpeople with lives? On television, we are referredto as consumers, not people. But we are people,with lives, and we must make and design thingsfor people. And if I am a consumer, what can Iconsume? Shoe polish, food, juice, some tooth-paste. But actually, very little that is sold to mecan actually be consumed. Sooner or later, almostall of it has to be thrown away. I cannot consumea television set. Or a VCR. Or a car. If I pre-sented you with a television set and covered it upand said, “I have this amazing item. What itwill do as a service will astonish you. But before Itell you what it does, let me tell you what it ismade of and you can tell me if you want it inyour house. It contains 4,060 chemicals, many ofwhich are toxic, two hundred of which off-gasinto the room when it is turned on. It also con-tains 18 grams of toxic methyl mercury, has anexplosive glass tube, and I urge you to put it ateye-level with your children and encourage themto play with it.” Would you want this in yourhome?

Michael Braungart, an ecological chemistfrom Hamburg, Germany, has pointed out thatwe should remove the word “waste” from our vo-cabulary and start using the word product in-stead, because if waste is going to equal food, itmust also be a product. Braungart suggests wethink about three distinct product types:

First, there are consumables, and actually weshould be producing more of them. These areproducts that when eaten, used, or thrown away,literally turn back into dirt, and therefore arefood for other living organisms. Consumablesshould not be placed in landfills, but put on theground so that they restore the life, health, andfertility of the soil. This means that shampoosshould be in bottles made of beets that are biode-gradable in your compost pile. It means carpetsthat break down into carbon dioxide and water.It means furniture made of lignin, potato peels

and technical enzymes that looks just like yourmanufactured furniture of today except it can besafely returned to the earth. It means that all“consumable” goods should be capable of return-ing to the soil from whence they came.

Second are products of service, also known asdurables, such as cars and television sets. Theyare called products of service because what wewant as customers is the service the product pro-vides—food, entertainment, or transportation. Toeliminate the concept of waste, products of servicewould not be sold, but licensed to the end-user.Customers may use them as long as they wish,even sell the license to someone else, but whenthe end-user is finished with, say, a television, itgoes back to Sony, Zenith, or Philips. It is “food”for their system, but not for natural systems .Right now, you can go down the street, dump aTV into the garbage can, and walk away. In theprocess, we deposit persistent toxins throughoutthe planet. Why do we give people that responsi-bility and stress? Products of service must con-tinue beyond their initial product life, be ownedby their manufacturers, and be designed for dis-assembly, re-manufacture, and continuous re-use.

The third type of product is called“unmarketables.” The question is, why wouldanyone produce a product that no one wouldbuy? Welcome to the world of nuclear waste, di-oxins, and chromium-tanned leather. We are es-sentially making products or subcomponents ofproducts that no one should buy, or, in manycases, do not realize they are buying. These prod-ucts must not only cease to be sold, but those al-ready sold should be stored in warehouses whenthey are finished until we can figure out a safeand non-toxic way to dispose of them.

I will describe a few projects and how these is-sues are implicit in design directions. I rememberwhen we were hired to design the office for anenvironmental group. The director said at theend of contract negotiations, “By the way, if any-body in our office gets sick from indoor air quality,we’re going to sue you.” After wondering if weshould even take the job, we decided to goahead, that it was our job to find the materials

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that wouldn’t make people sick when placedinside a building. And what we found is thatthose materials weren’t there. We had to workwith manufacturers to find out what was intheir products, and we discovered that the en-tire system of building construction is essen-tially toxic. We are still working on the mate-rials side.

For a New York men’s clothing store, wearranged for the planting of 1,000 oak treesto replace the two English oaks used to panelthe store . We were inspired by a famous storytold by Gregory Bateson about New Collegein Oxford, England. It went something likethis. They had a main hall built in the early1600s with beams forty feet long and twofeet thick. A commitee was formed to try tofind replacement trees because the beamswere suffering from dry rot. If you keep inmind that a veneer from an English oak canbe worth seven dollars a square foot, the totalreplacement cost for the oaks was prohibi-tively expensive. And they didn’t havestraight forty foot English oaks from matureforests with which to replace the beams. Ayoung faculty member joined the committeeand said, “Why don’t we ask the College For-ester if some of the lands that have beengiven to Oxford might have enough trees tocall upon?” And when they brought in theforester he said, “We’ve been wonderingwhen you would ask this question. When thepresent building was constructed 350 yearsago, the architects specified that a grove oftrees be planted and maintained to replacethe beams in the ceiling when they wouldsuffer from dry rot.” Bateson’s remark was,“That’s the way to run a culture.” Our ques-tion and hope is, “Did they replant them?”

For Warsaw, Poland, we responded to adesign competition for a high-rise building.When the client chose our design as the win-ner after seeing the model, we said, “We’renot finished yet. We have to tell you aboutthe building. The base is made from concreteand includes tiny bits of rubble from World

War II. It looks like limestone, but therubble’s there for visceral reasons.” And hesaid, “I understand, a phoenix rising.” Andwe said the skin is recycled aluminum, andhe said, “That’s O.K., that’s fine.” And wesaid, “The floor heights are thirteen feet clearso that we can convert the building intohousing in the future, when its utility as anoffice building is no longer. In this way, thebuilding is given a chance to have a long,useful life.” And he said, “That’s O.K.” Andwe told him that we would have openingwindows and that no one would be furtherthan twenty-five feet from a window, and hesaid that was O.K., too. And finally, wesaid, “By the way, you have to plant tensquare miles of forest to offset the building’seffect on climate change.” We had calculatedthe energy costs to build the structure, andthe energy cost to run and maintain it, andit worked out that 6,400 acres of new forestwould be needed to offset the effects on cli-mate change from the energy requirements.And he said he would get back to us. Hecalled back two days later and said, “You stillwin. I checked out what it would cost toplant ten square miles of trees in Poland andit turns out it’s equivalent to a small part ofour advertising budget.”

The architects representing a major retailchain called us a year ago and said, “Will youhelp us build a store in Lawrence, Kansas?” Isaid that I didn’t know if we could work withthem. I explained my thoughts on consumerswith lifestyles, and we needed to be in the po-sition to discuss their stores’ impact on smalltowns. Click. Three days later we were calledback and were told, “We have a question foryou that is coming from the top. Are you will-ing to discuss the fact that people with liveshave the right to buy the finest-quality prod-ucts, even under your own terms, at the low-est possible price?” We said, “Yes.” “Then wecan talk about the impact on small towns.”

We worked with them on the store inKansas. We converted the building from steel

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construction, which uses 300,000 BTUs persquare foot, to wood construction, which uses40,000 BTUs, thereby saving thousands of gal-lons of oil just in the fabrication of the building.We used only wood that came from resourcesthat were protecting biodiversity. In our researchwe found that the forests of James Madison andZachary Taylor in Virginia had been put intosustainable forestry and the wood for the beamscame from there and other forests managed thisway. We also arranged for no CFC’s to be usedin the store’s construction and systems, and initi-ated significant research and a major new in-dustry in daylighting. We have yet to fulfill ourconcerns about the bigger questions of products,their distribution and the chain’s impact onsmall towns, with the exception that this store isdesigned to be converted into housing when itsutility as a retail outlet has expired.

For the City of Frankfurt, we are designing aday-care center that can be operated by the chil-dren. It contains a greenhouse roof that has mul-tiple functions: it illuminates, heats both air andwater, cools, ventilates, and shelters from therain, just like a Bedouin tent. One problem wewere having during the design process was the en-gineers wanted to completely automate the build-ing, like a machine. The engineers asked, “Whathappens if the children forget to close the shadeand they get too hot?” We told them the childrenwould open a window. “What if they don’t opena window?”, the engineers wanted to know. Andwe told them that in that case the childrenwould probably close the shade. And they wantedto know what would happen if the childrendidn’t close the shade. And finally we told themthe children would open windows and closeshades when they were hot because children arenot dead but alive. Recognizing the importancefor children to look at the day in the morningand see what the sun is going to do that day andinteract with it, we enlisted the help of teachersof Frankfurt to get this one across because theteachers had told us the most important thingswas to find something for the children to do.Now the children have ten minutes of activity in

the morning and ten minutes of activity whenthey leave the building, opening and closing thesystem, and both the children and teachers lovethe idea. Because of the solar hot-water collectors,we asked that a public laundry be added to theprogram so that parents could wash clothes whileawaiting their children in school. Because of ad-vances in glazing, we are able to create a day-care center that requires no fossil fuels for operat-ing the heating or cooling. Fifty years from now,when fossil fuels will be scarce, there will be hotwater for the community, a social center, and thebuilding will have paid back the energy “bor-rowed” for its construction.

As we become aware of the ethical implica-tions of design, not only with respect to buildings,but in every aspect of human endeavor, they re-flect changes in the historical concept of who orwhat has rights. When you study the history ofrights, you begin with the Magna Carta, whichwas about the rights of white, English, noblemales. With the Declaration of Independence,rights were expanded to all landowning whitemales. Nearly a century later, we moved to theemancipation of slaves, and during the begin-nings of this century, to suffrage, giving the rightto women to vote. Then the pace picks up withthe Civil Rights Act in 1964, and then in 1973,the Endangered Species Act. For the first time,the right of other species and organisms to existwas recognized. We have essentially “declared”that Homo Sapiens are part of the web of life.Thus, if Thomas Jefferson were with us today, hewould be calling for a Declaration of Interdepen-dence which recognizes that our ability to pursuewealth, health, and happiness is dependent onother forms of life, that the rights of one speciesare linked to the rights of others and none shouldsuffer remote tyranny.

This Declaration of Interdependence comeshard on the heels of realizing that the world hasbecome vastly complex, both in its workings andin our ability to perceive and comprehend thosecomplexities. In this complicated world, priormodes of domination have essentially lost theirability to maintain control. The sovereign,

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whether in the form of a king or nation, nolonger seems to reign. Nations have lost controlof money to global, computerized trading sys-tems. The sovereign is also losing the ability todeceive and manipulate, as in the case ofChernobyl. While the erstwhile Soviet Repub-lic told the world that Chernobyl was nothingto be concerned about, satellites with ten-meter resolution showed the world that it wassomething to worry about. And what we sawat the Earth Summit was that the sovereignhas lost the ability to lead even on the most el-ementary level. When Maurice Strong, thechair of the United Nations Conference on theEnvironment and Development, was askedhow many leaders were at the Earth Summit,he said there were over 100 heads of state.Unfortunately, we didn’t have any leaders.

When Emerson came back from Europe,he wrote essays for Harvard on Nature. Hewas trying to understand that if human be-ings make things and human beings arenatural, then are all the things human beingsmake natural? He determined that Naturewas all those things which were immutable.The oceans, the mountains, the sky. Well, wenow know that they are mutable. We wereoperating as if Nature is the Great Motherwho never has any problems, is always therefor her children, and requires no love in re-turn. When you think about Genesis and theconcept of dominion over natural things, werealize that even if we want to get into a dis-cussion of stewardship versus dominion, in theend, the question is, if you have dominion,and perhaps we do have dominion, isn’t itimplicit that we have stewardship too, be-cause how can you have dominion over some-thing you’ve killed?

We must face the fact that what we areseeing across the world today is war, a waragainst life itself. Our present systems of de-sign have created a world that grows far be-yond the capacity of the environment to sus-tain life into the future. The industrialidiom of design, failing to honor the prin-

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ciples of nature, can only violate them, pro-ducing waste and harm, regardless of pur-ported intention. If we destroy more forests,burn more garbage, drift-net more fish, burnmore coal, bleach more paper, destroy moretopsoil, poison more insects, build over morehabitats, dam more rivers, produce moretoxic and radioactive waste, we are creatinga vast industrial machine, not for living in,but for dying in. It is a war, to be sure, awar that only a few more generations cansurely survive.

When I was in Jordan, I worked for KingHussein on the master plan for the JordanValley. I was walking through a village thathad been flattened by tanks and I saw achild’s skeleton squashed into the adobe block

and was horrified. My Arab host turned to meand said, “Don’t you know what war is?” And Isaid, “I guess I don’t.” And he said, “War is whenthey kill your children.” So I believe we’re at war.But we must stop. To do this, we have to stop de-signing everyday things for killing, and we haveto stop designing killing machines.

We have to recognize that every event andmanifestation of nature is “design,” that to livewithin the laws of nature means to express ourhuman intention as an interdependent species,aware and grateful that we are at the mercy ofsacred forces larger than ourselves, and that weobey these laws in order to honor the sacred ineach other and in all things. We must come topeace with and accept our place in the naturalworld.

William McDonough

This sermon was conceived, written, and delivered by Wil-liam McDonough. Mr. McDonough wishes to thank Paul

Hawken for his assistance in preparing it for publication.