So begins one of the seminal texts of our generation, Cradle to Cradle, co-authored by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. I remember reading it cover to cover in just a few days and feeling I had actually read it about three times. Every paragraph seemed so packed with provocative, transformative thought I found myself going back over many of them four and five times- pledging them to memory so I could draw on them in conversations. I would argue that there are few books, and few concepts, that have had as large an impact on our culture in general and the sustainable design community in particular in the last 40 years. The notions within Cradle to Cradle are now so much a part of the basic fabric of our thinking that it is hard to imagine a time when they had not been so clearly and effectively communicated. The book is so successful because it does so with a clever mixture of intelligent analysis and disarming humor. The title of this post is a reference to the opening chapter which takes the book itself, the object in your hands at the time, as a starting point in the discussion- a book made not from paper but from a synthetic material that can be remade into other books over and over and over again. Waste equals food, as in nature, one of the core concepts of the book. From here they argue we need to be effective rather than efficient, they argue for the central role of design in problem solving (by pointing out its central role in problem creating) and they point out that one of the fundamental elements of all truly sustainable systems is diversity.
William McDonough, of course, is not just an author but an architect and designer, the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners. He founded MBDC (the organization that tracks Cradle to Cradle product certification) with Michael Braungart, who also founded the Environmental Protection and Encouragement Agency.
William McDonough, I am very excited to say, will deliver the Opening Keynote at Urban Green Expo 2010.
McDonough’s design work has included too many inspiring projects to list all of them here but, for me, the standouts are places like the Ford River Rouge plant and the Herman Miller offices, the FLOW house in New Orleans, and, under construction now, the NASA Sustainability Base at their Ames campus. The work challenges our accepted way of doing things at every turn while remaining functional and pragmatic, it is decidedly modern and yet responsive to context. You can learn more about his work in several places around the web. There’s the Waste = Food documentary, here. And there’s a great piece from the Atlantic a few years back titled The NEXT Industrial Revolution. But of course the best way to learn about his work is to come see him speak at our conference.
I am delighted to have this body of work and thought featured at our conference on September 29th. I hope everyone reading can join us.
