1995-03-12: Structural Reform: New Architecture for a New Age (part 1)

Vol. III, No. XI

Transcription:

William McDonough, UVA
Sanford Lopater,
With Good Reason
Volume II, Number XI
Structural Reform: New Architecture
for a New Age
Greeting
We live in them and work in them. Yet how often do we consider
how the buildings we occupy affect the way we live? We do just
that next on With Good Reason. I'm Laura Womack.
Music
Background
Who controls life aboard ship? The captain? Navigator? The
purser? None of the above. The ship designer dictates life on
board, because his decisions about how many cabins to include,
their layout, and cargo space limit the captain's options.
My first guest uses this example to illustrate how structural
design subtlety but constantly influences our lives. My second
guest adds to this theme. He's a psychologist who's studied the
mental impact of architectural design.
Now William McDonough joins us. He's an architect who teaches at
the University of Virginia. William McDonough helped Wal-Mart
incorporate design features at their new Lawrence, Kansas store
that improved the indoor atmosphere and the outdoor environment.
I asked him to explain what "green architecture" is.
McDonough
Green architecture, I suppose, would be an architecture,
ultimately, I suppose it's an architecture that would be more
restorative than it is destructive.
Womack
What do you mean by more restorative than destructive? We
think architecture, you're building buildings?
McDonough
Well, when you think about what goes into making a building,
and you think about the industrial system that feeds that
process, its been said that our industrial system is 93%
inefficient. So, if we look at all the natural resources being
marshalled to make buildings, for example, and the energy systems
that are being put into them, that are inefficient effectively or
fossil fuel driven, a building essentially is more destructive
than it is restorative, because of the nature of the process of
making buildings. So I suppose green architecture attempts to be
more like a tree. It would transform natural energy flows into
something more fecund, more potent, and give back perhaps even
more than it takes.
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Womack
Give me an example of what you're talking about because we
think in the United States we're very efficient. You say 93%
inefficient.
McDonough
Inefficient, yeah. We're actually not efficient at all. If
you look at the amount of material it takes to do something, and
what gets dropped along the way, you find out that we do not have
a "cradle to cradle" mentality as I call it. We're still cradle
to grave. So, we're looking at starting a new industrial
revolution where products go back into closed cycles. So that,
for example, a chair would go back to the factory from whence it
came and become a chair again in the future.
Womack
Why isn't that happening now?
McDonough
I think because we haven't needed to. I think because the
system has sort of evolved this way. Cheap raw materials, cheap
energy. I think people are now realizing that it's not just the
first cost, it's also the long term cost, the cost to the
persistent toxification to the environment, for example.
Womack
Tell me what you're doing with buildings to design them so
that they can be recycled.
McDonough
Well, we did a store for Wal-Mart in Lawrence, Kansas where
the actual store was designed so that it could become housing in
the future. Right now we build all these single purpose
buildings. You know people go out and use the lowest common
denominator and build a sealed glass office building that could
never be converted to housing, for example. And then once the
office market changes that building becomes useless. If you
think about the loft buildings for example, in Soho or industrial
buildings in many communities from the turn of the century, those
buildings are adaptable to almost any human use because they had
high ceilings, high windows allowed daylight in deep, the high
ceilings allowed hot air to stay up high in the summer. They are
often massive constructions which allowed for them to store the
coldness of the evening for the day, and so on and so forth. So
those buildings can be used for almost any human purpose, and
over time they've been transformed from warehouses to factories
to offices to apartments to artists studios, you name it. And
that allows the building to be maintained and keep neighborhoods
intact.
Womack
Tell us about the polish trade center.
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McDonough
That was a competition we won back in 1989 for a skyscraper
in Warsaw. And it was the first building I think,
internationally, that was seen as sort of breaking the mold a
little bit in terms of asking the building to be made from
recycled materials and super energy efficient, convertible into
housing, it's a fifty story building convertible into housing.
Windows all open. And when we met with the client who came to
see us he walked into the office, saw the model, it's quite a_
handsome design I think, and he walked into the office and looked
at the model on the conference table and he said, "You win". And
we said, well, we're not done yet. We, you know, the windows all
open so the people can get fresh air if they need it. And he
said, "Oh, that's fine". And then we said it's made from
recycled materials, aluminum in this case, for the skin. And he
said "Oh, that's very nice". And then we said it's convertible
into housing in the future and the ceilings are 13 and 1/2 feet,
and the daylight gets in very deep and nobody will be more than
twenty-five feet from a window, everyone has daylight. We went
through this whole litany of things including the fact that the
base was made out of panels that look like limestone that were
made with concrete including rubble from the war so that it was
really ground up and mixed into it little chips of brick and
glass steel. So it looked like limestone but it's really meant
to be like Phoenix rising from the ashes so there's this symbolic
aspect of it. And we went through all this and he said, "Oh
that's wonderful, wonderful". And at the end I said, "One more
thing, you have to plant ten miles of trees, ten square miles of
trees to offset the buildings effects on global warming".
Because we had calculated how much energy it took to make the
building and how much it took to operate the building and how
much CO2 would be produced in that action and then determine the
number of trees needed to be planted to replace the oxygen. And
he said "Well, you're right, you know, we have to think about
this". So he took a, he went off for three days and he came back
and he said, "You know, you've got your trees. I've just
calculated how much it costs to plant ten square miles of trees
in Poland and it's equal to one-tenth of my advertising budget".
The project was a theoretical project for the western companies
going into Poland. That whole exercise, basicly, was sort of
stopped as the government changed.
Womack
Tell me about your store for Wal-Mart which has gotten a lot
of attention in the media. What did you do for Wal-Mart?
McDonough
Well, we were asked to think about what it would mean for
them to think about their stores in more environmentally
sensitive ways, and the building we ended up working with them on
has no CFC's in it anywhere. We used low toxicity materials
wherever possible. The wood for the roof is all from sustainably
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harvested sources where the forests are maintained and the whole
store is conceived for daylighting.
Womack
That's an interesting concept. When I'm in a large store
like a Wal-Mart I never think about the fact that there aren't
windows. What does that do to the atmosphere inside the Wal-Mart?
McDonough
Well, it changes things completely. We think that people
would rather spend their days outdoors than indoors. So we try
to make our interiors as much like the outdoors as possible. So
it changes the color temperatures, as we call them, the fabrics
for example look fabulous because you're looking at them under
daylight, you don't have to look at something as if you're
underwater and then run outside to see what it really looks like.
The people that work there love it because they spend their day
knowing whether the sun is shining or not. It saves a lot of
energy, obviously. That was the main selling point at the
beginning because we were uncertain about its effects on retail,
but that's now been proven. So it just changes the way you spend
your day. You spend your day feeling very refreshed, and you
know where you are.
Womack
You mentioned sustainably harvested wood that was used in
the building of Wal-Mart. For those of us who aren't necessarily
involved with the environmental movement, what does that mean,
and where did you find the wood?
McDonough
Well it means that you maintain the forest in the state of
forest, that's with complex biodiversity. And in that regard our
harvesting techniques should be attuned to natural systems. So
there are forestry projects, some of which we've actually
created, where the forestry is done in tune with nature. In
other words it replicates natural treefalls, lightening strikes,
so on and so forth. So it's a culling kind of forestry.
Womack
This concept that you're talking about is difficult though
because you don't necessarily get huge quantities of lumber which
is why we view forestry the way we have.
McDonough
Well, yeah, but I mean for how long can we maintain it and
what is net effect? I mean if we lose the entire salmon industry
on the west coast in the process I don't think we've done a very
good balancing act with marshalling our perpetual job creation.
Womack
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How expensive is this re-used cycle and getting woods from
sustainably harvested forest? I'm asking this because it's more
expensive to renovate an old building than it is to just put up a
new one.
McDonough
Well what we've found is that basically the cost for what we
do is about ten percent more than a normal project. If you
actually look at the characteristics of these projects, for __
example, in an office building our materials are safer, we have
much higher productivity potentials in our office than most
people because we're giving people direct outdoor air directed to
their face. Each person, each individual has access to daylight,
they have access to fresh air.
Womack
Is that measurable, that increase in productivity?
McDonough
Yeah, one of the most amazing studies we've just seen is
from Lockheed out in California. They can measure up to sixteen
percent, which is, to me, astonishing. Actually to me that's a
signal, I really have to wonder what they were doing before if
that's the nature of the productivity shift.
Womack
Sixteen percent more increase in productivity with fresh
air?
McDonough
Yeah, with lighting. Actually their case was lighting.
From my perspective, if you think about it this way, and this is
why our clients who include Fortune 500 companies like our work
and allow us to do it and pay for it, is that they recognize that
productivity is much more important than the first costs. And if
you look at an office building, 200 square feet assigned per
person at a hundred dollars a square foot, that's 20,000 dollars
you're going to spend on a person's work space. And that person
may be earning 40,000 dollars a year, say, or costing the company
40,000 dollars a year with benefits and so on. Well that means
you're spending 20,000 dollars on something which might last ten
years in terms of your economic evaluations for a person earning
40,000 dollars a year. Which means you're spending two thousand
dollars a year on the space for a person earning 40,000. In
other words you're spending five percent on their physical space.
Now if I spend another thousand dollars on that person's space to
make sure they get fresh air delivered to their face, then I'm
spending somewhere between a hundred and two hundred dollars a
year on that person for their physical space to bring these kinds
of benefits to that person. Now, if I get a one percent
productivity increase, that's five minutes a day of a person not
rubbing red eyes because of interair quality problems, or for
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feeling very refreshed because they have fresh air in their face
or feeling really refreshed because they know whether it's day or
night, then I've paid for my, I've doubled the cost of that
improvement.
Womack
You said some of your clients are Fortune 500 companies, are
they with you on these figures?
McDonough
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Womack
Give me an example.
McDonough
Our clients include Herman Miller corporation, one of the
larger furniture companies in the country. Rodell press, the Gap
in California, we're working with them. We've done work before
with AT&T, city of Chattanooga, things like that.
Womack
Tell us about your day care center in Germany.
McDonough
Well it was designed as a, to be like a tree. The building
was designed to produce more energy that it required to operate.
This way, the building would be like a tree. It would store
energy from the summer, for the winter. It would give energy
back to the community. We added a public laundry to the daycare
center so that the solar heated hot water, free hot water, would
be given to the community. So this is a middle class
neighborhood, these people who are waiting for their children for
example, at the daycare center could do their laundry and have a
place to meet and talk with each other and have a civic act occur
there. And by providing free hot water, it's a way for the
building to actually pay back what we call its embodied energy
mortgage. In other words, how much energy did it take to make
the building? Wouldn't it be wonderful it the building could
actually pay back the amount of energy that was borrowed from
some other form, to actually build it? So over time the building
is actually producing more than it takes, so it pays back its
mortgage.
Womack
I think that the concept of
difficult one, at least for me.
gasoline to run the bulldozers?
McDonough
an energy mortgage is a
Are you talking about the.
Right. Exactly. And the trucks that brought the concrete
block and the amount of energy required to make the cement and so
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on and so forth. And you see the marvelous thing about just
thinking this way, even if you do it on a theoretical basis, is
you start to do a balancing act. You start to understand that
things have net effects. So you make decisions like, "Let me use
a material that's less energy intensive". Because if I use more
efficient material then my mortgage is less. A good example
would be, for example on a photovoltaya collector. What we're
about to see are solar electric collectors that are affordable,
that are going to be producing electricity affordably, very soon.
Womack
Solar panels?
McDonough
Solar panels. But these are the electrical producing kind.
We're going to see them at the utility levels right away.
Womack
How do you convince people to adopt these ideas? Forgive me
but they sound a little touchy, feely, they seem radical.
McDonough
We need to build models and then be able to let people come
in ahd kick the tires. I mean that's all there is to it. A lot
of the problem with say, solar work in the seventies from my
perspective is that they were thought of in a linear engineering
way. People started designing houses that were solar collectors.
Well, for a lot of people, a lot of those solar houses were ugly,
and they were designed as solar collectors to live in. Well
people don't live in solar collectors, they live in houses. So
until they see it as something that's part of their own
experience and part of their own culture, I don't think it will
be generally accepted. So what we're looking at now is fantastic
new technologies for solar collectors that are essentially
roofing materials. So flat roof buildings, the Wal-Mart's of
the world, could have solar collectors on their roofs because the
roofing itself would produce electricity. So I think once we
have enough experience with these things and people can see them,
they'll find them attractive. But it's a bottom line issue as
far as I can tell. People, we need to show that they're
affordable and they're practical and easy to use, and they work.
Womack
Thank you so much for joining us on With Good Reason William
McDonough.
McDonough
My pleasure.
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My guest is William McDonough, an architect who teaches at the
University of Virginia.
This is With Good Reason. I'm Laura Womack.
(MUSIC)