Michael McDonough Interview. November 18, 2003.
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Your e-House is a unique mix of high performance and alternative technologies. What was your inspiration?
I was prompted by an article I did with Bruce Sterling for Wired called “Newer New York,” which became a focal point for learning about and consolidating information on all the building products in existence. Much to my surprise, every single thing I could think of - if I Googled around enough - I found. And more often than not, I discovered that I could buy it with a credit card and have it shipped overnight to a building site. I quite literally found the future of building on the Internet, waiting to be purchased and implemented. This notion became the basis for a science fiction story, but then I started thinking about building it for real. My wife and I were looking at property in upstate New York at the time, so we decided to go for it.
How is e-House a metaphor for the community?
Buildings should not be considered as isolated objects. It’s profoundly important to understand how they’re connected to the ground and the sky, and how they’re connected to the culture of an area. In terms of technological connections, or connections to the culture of technology, this means making a building that thinks for itself, analogous to the way a human body functions. I’d like the building to adjust itself according to temperature and send email alerts when it needs attention.
What’s the importance of holistic thinking in architecture? Every building has connections to the sky, ground, and community, but these could be appreciated and utilized much better. In e-House, we collect rainwater to irrigate our garden. We also use it to store energy from the sun and the earth, and that energy is used to heat or cool a hyper-energy-efficient house. If you extend this thinking to other building systems, you can engineer a geothermal field for maximum efficiency by back-filling it with clean, well-drained, fertile, soil, and get both a heating and cooling source for your home and a productive organic garden. The more people start doing this community-wide, the more open space and forest can be conserved. This, of course, is an alternative to suburban sprawl. If government encourages this tendency through tax policy, you get large organic districts with hyper-energy-efficient homes.
Such districts can have economic and social value. We planned e-House to have an organic micro-farm, greenhouse, and agro-forestry (this is located in New York City’s watershed - a 1900-square-mile district that feeds the city’s reservoirs, delivering a billion gallons of potable water daily). Imagine that new home building in this vast area were encouraged to have organic micro-agricultural uses. New York City and its surrounding areas would be tethered to each other - clean, pure water from organic watersheds and urban markets for local organic produce. So the land and buildings can multi-task and form mutually beneficial relationships at any scale. This is the sort of productive, holistic thinking I want to encourage in architecture and, in turn, in public policy and regional planning.
How are megacities impacting the environment?
There’s nothing to say that cities are in and of themselves bad. You can do green buildings, you can do green infrastructure systems, and you can reduce vehicular transport by using mass transportation. You can consolidate building construction and heating and cooling systems in larger structures - not that you should do mega-structures, necessarily, but there are efficiencies of scale. The surprise is that New York City is one of the most environmentally efficient cities on the surface of the planet because of its density. So density is not necessarily the enemy. It seems to be that suburban sprawl is the enemy; this is where you need to have more profound innovation. My suggestion is that you stop thinking about the city and the suburbs and the exurbs and the rural areas as separate entities and you really consider them as united eco-systems.
From a design perspective, are there exemplary building materials for dense environments?
I like bamboo a lot. The more you use it, the better things get. It’s deeply versed in cultures all over the world, it’s stronger than steel in tension, it’s stronger than concrete in compression, and it’s more stable than red oak, which is a very stable flooring. When you plant it, it acts as a bio-absorber, cleaning pollutants out of the soil; it simultaneously stabilizes the soil and prevents erosion. While it’s doing all of these good things, it returns more oxygen to the air through photosynthesis than almost any other deciduous plant.
It’s clear, then, we need to plant more bamboo around the world!
If we did that it could have a profound effect on carbon sequestration, which means it could sequester carbon out of the atmosphere and deal with global warming related to the problem of greenhouse gases.
Do you think architecture can link up with other disciplines, like manufacturing, to start addressing the global housing crisis?
Architects continue to attempt universal solutions. The problem is, we don’t have a universal climate. And you really need to adjust your building types to climate. What makes sense in southern California may not make sense in northern Canada, for example. But there are useful manufactured components of buildings, such as structural insulated panels that have high insulative value. You can have a design produced on a computer and email it to one of the manufacturers, and they will cut out the doors and windows and number the panels and put it together like some sort of fanciful Lego system. This allows for a distributed manufacturing system that can be adjusted regionally. At the same time, you can have almost infinite design flexibility, which is a problem, for example, with modular houses.
What does it mean today for designers to think globally?
Well, I think whenever you sit down at the drafting board or the computer, whatever your media might be, it’s important to ask yourself what the implications of a project are, beyond the object itself - whether the object is a building or a chair or a table. To constantly ask, “What are the processes by which this thing is produced?’ and “What are the processes by which it will end its useful life?’ Beyond that, I like the idea of multi-tier thinking. It’s always good to investigate the possibility of making any one system do multiple things. As I mentioned with the e-House, if you’re going to spend a lot of time and energy engineering one of its systems, shouldn’t you also ask yourself what else that one system could do?
Michael McDonough is an architect and industrial designer who consults worldwide on corporate futurism, personal environments, and product development. Inspired by systems convergence theory and sustainable technologies, he admits, using the words of Adolf Loos, that he designs everything “from the spoon to the city.” For more on the e-House see www.e-House.us.
Massive Change Radio was broadcast on the University of Toronto’s CIUT 89.5 FM from September 2003 to June 2004. Created and hosted by Jennifer Leonard, co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004) and former Institute without Boundaries team member, the entire season of multidisciplinary interviews is archived for download.
