"Architects are no longer able to say destruction
of the environment is not a part of our plans. Rather, history reveals
it is our de facto plan,"
according to the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, Architecture
and Community Design, Charlottesville, Va., an internationally recognized
design firm practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent
architecture and planning in the U.S. and abroad.
William McDonough, FAIA, former dean of the School
of Architecture at the University of Virginia, called for a major cultural
change in the way our environment is treated during an hour-long seminar
for participants at the annual AIA convention in Charlotte, May 10.
During the two-part session shared with Christopher
Hayes of his firm, McDonough said architects must "treat nature as
our model and our mentor." The question facing today's designers
is not one of no growth, he said, but rather, "What do we want to
grow?"
McDonough predicts "The Next Industrial Revolution"
as the answer to the question, "What about human health and ecological
health?"
The theme of the first Industrial Revolution, according
to McDonough, was "If brute force doesn't work, you're not using
enough of it." But societies have no Bill of Rights allowing them
to give people cancer, respiratory ailments or a host of other physical
and mental afflictions, he exhorted.
Born in 1951 in Tokyo and raised in Hong Kong, McDonough
said it was there he learned respect for the environment. "Relationship
to the environment matters there because every square inch of land matters,"
he explained.
Referring to the Hannover Principles he developed,
McDonough told the standing-room-only audience that architects should
expand their design considerations to respect even distant effects. "We
must accept responsibilities for our actions, eliminate the concept of
waste, and learn to rely on natural energy.
"When do we have buildings that will make more
energy than they consume? When do humans become tools of nature?"
he asked.
Hayes, who focused on his firm's design for The
Museum of Life and the Environment, in York County, S.C., led the last
half of the seminar. He called the "green museum" an attempt
to develop a "place where you can hardly separate where buildings
end and landscape begins.
"This is not a black box separated from its
environment," he said of the museum on the bank of the Catawba River,
30 minutes south of Charlotte. The previously undeveloped 400-acre site
will reconnect the local community to the river, its developers say.
As McDonough + Partners' first museum project, the
architecture and its systems seek to demonstrate natural processes in
a living architecture.
Among the building systems are heating and cooling
designs, which will involve a radiant floor system that works with the
mass of the earth and the coolness of the water to regulate temperature.
Photovoltaics will utilize the sun's energy to power the building while
the primary structural walls, built of custom, hollow-concrete blocks
measuring three by five feet, will pass air through the facility.
"All of our projects celebrate nature and encourage
connection to the world outside," McDonough concluded.
Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects.
All rights reserved.
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