McDonough Creates Sustainable Templates for China

Architect William McDonough has joined the throngs of architects in the building gold rush currently in progress in China – but, of course, he has a different goal – bringing his cradle-to-cradle protocol there to assist in sustainable development.

China’s modernization is proceeding at an almost unfathomable pace. McDonough is trying to spread the word of building sustainably by developing planning templates that can be used for a wide range of projects. He is working with the China Housing Industry Association (CHIA) which conducted a mass-energy study on what would happen if the planned 400 million units were built with brick. They found that China would lose all their soil and burn all their coal! The result would be cities, but without food or energy. That?s how big this is. 174 jurisdictions have already made brick illegal.

The Chinese are going to house 400 million people in the next 12 years. Essentially they are rebuilding the housing stock of two Americas – in 12 years.

McDonough is working with CHIA and a group of developers to create templates for cities based on the cradle-to-cradle protocol. What we do, he says, is examine sites – some of which are as big as 20 square kilometers – through a different set of lenses. “We look at them, for example, as if we were a migrating bird. What would we want to see there in terms of evolution? We also look at it from the ground: What am I doing here? Another lens would be hydrology. What if I’m groundwater or a raindrop? So we work from the sky, into the earth. We’re the master planners for seven sites. And the basic point is that if you look at the world through a new let of lenses, suddenly the ecosystem becomes your infrastructure.”

CHIA is a consortium of private developers charged with building housing. Because of the huge amount of building in progress, the central government turned responsibilities over to regional authorities and developers.

“Can I turn it around tomorrow?,” asks McDonough. “No. Nobody can. What I?m simply looking at is how we can chart a course.”

Instead of moving everyone into cities, McDonough is trying to upgrade rural housing to maintain the historical farm villages. He’s looking at how people can afford to stay in the country, where there is now abject poverty. His goal is to design a house for $3,500, the equivalent of ten years of family income. “We?re working with BASF, the world?s largest chemical company, to develop a way of using toxin-free polystyrene foam. We?d put thin concrete skins on both sides. It?d be like big foam-core board, which we?d run on the outside of the house, like putting a big sleeping bag over it. It?s a one-time use of natural gas to make a building that?s super-efficient and doesn?t need natural gas. That?s the strategy to replace brick on the large technological scale.”

He also notes that China offers unique opportunities as well as grave concerns. It will be the first country to do massive solarization, he says, and that will be a gift to us because they will bring the price down.

Read the full interview in Metropolis, Feb 05, p 30

http://www.mcdonoughpartners.com/