Tuesday, July 16, 2002

'Sustaining' Design Draws Attention at Meeting of Campus Planners By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER San Diego Building designs and practices that meet current and future needs without compromising the environment are hot topics at the annual meeting of the Society for College and University Planning, which began here Sunday. The meeting's tone was set in a keynote address by William McDonough, a former dean of the University of Virginia's architecture school who now divides his time between a private architectural practice and teaching at Virginia and at Cornell University. Mr. McDonough, a well-known champion of design that is ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent, offered a wide-ranging and philosophical discussion of rights and responsibilities that he said should affect the design of everything from buildings to paper plates. He spoke of "loving the offspring of all living things," and also of the potential for a second industrial revolution based on practices that would be not just sustainable -- not consuming irreplaceable resources and not creating toxins -- but also sustaining. Suppose, for instance, that Styrofoam containers were replaced by packaging made of rice straw, "with a little nitrogen added for an extra kick," he said. The containers would degrade into valuable nutrients, and could be marked "Please litter" because they would benefit the ground they were strewn on. "Within six months we'll have affordable biodegradable plates, forks, and spoons," he said. Mr. McDonough also advocated designing buildings that take advantage of natural light, have windows that open, and avoid materials made with harmful chemicals. Citing a headquarters building he designed for Herman Miller, the office-furnishings manufacturer, he said that access to natural light and air increase both productivity and happiness among employees. In his architectural practice, he said, buildings intended for use as offices are designed so that they can be easily converted to housing if needs change. "If you design buildings people can live in, they can work in them, too," he said. "Higher education is the ideal place to put these ideas into practice," said Mr. McDonough, who was the architect of Oberlin College's environmental-studies center. The center, which opened in 2000 but is still being tinkered with, is intended to give back more than it takes over the course of a year, recycling its water and generating electricity with photovoltaic cells on its roof. (See an article from The Chronicle, January 21, 2000.) His firm is also working on projects at the University of California at Davis, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Rhode Island. Mr. McDonough has been in the news recently as the force behind a plan to grow plants on the roofs of buildings at a giant Ford Motor Company plant in Dearborn, Mich. With Michael Braungart, he has just published a book about sustaining design, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. (See an article from The Chronicle, April 12.) During a second well-attended presentation Monday morning, Mr. McDonough was joined by Anthony Cortese, president of Second Nature, which works with college administrators who are interested in setting environmentally sustainable goals for their institutions. Other popular sessions at the meeting focused on benchmarks for building and program sustainability, and on constructing sustainable buildings on limited budgets, such as George Fox University's year-old Edward F. Stevens Center, a $7-million project that relied on a number of innovative strategies to keep costs down. The meeting here has attracted about 1,200 college and university architects and planners, as well as others interested in campus-planning issues. It continues through Wednesday. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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