In the world where “green” has generated all flavors of snake oil and salesmen, Fast Company’s Danielle Sacks takes a very sharp look at William McDonough, the former dean of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture and self-promoting megaphone behind the failed Chinese eco-village, Huangbaiyu, in Liaoning province. This is a cautionary tale that underscores the inherent problems of mashing up good ideas, real-world implementation and proprietary greed. Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough.
In Thomas Friedman’s 2006 documentary Addicted to Oil, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist held up McDonough as the kind of problem solver who could wean China from its voracious energy consumption. “Bill invited our film crew to join him in Huangbaiyu [in rural northeast China] to see firsthand how cradle to cradle translates to China,” says Friedman in a voice-over, as a herd of cashmere goats ramble by the world-famous architect. As McDonough had been telling countless audiences and reporters, he’d been recruited “to develop protocols for the housing of 400 million people in 12 years,” rural Chinese who were to migrate to a series of brand new eco-cities. In the scene, dozens of partially built homes glimmer in the distance, the first glimpse of McDonough’s redesign of 21st-century Chinese life. “Chinese officials at the highest level of government are listening to Bill,” says Friedman, a few frames later. “And if things go well in this trial village, China, of all places, could become a new model of sustainable development.”
When LEED’s [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] Rob Watson saw the documentary, he called Friedman immediately. “I was like, ‘Tom, you should have talked to me about this before you put it on Discovery!’ ” says Watson, who has been on the ground in China for the last decade developing green building standards and energy codes. “That just made me blow a gasket, because when that was being filmed, things were starting to go south, and [McDonough] knew it — they knew it! And they still put it on film! The whole experiment was touted as a success long after it failed. Nobody’s living there, nobody moved in. It’s sitting there, literally, rotting.”
PBS’s Frontline/World’s Timothy Lesle documents the failure in China: Green Dreams – a not so model village
“The village of Huangbaiyu in rural northeast China was supposed to be a model for energy-conscious design. The initial project was to build 400 sustainable homes, a collaboration between U.S. architect William McDonough and the Chinese. But something went awry.”
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Update, February 10, 2009:
Received the following link through a comment on this post from Shannon May, “the resident anthropologist, studying the effects of rapid, communal change in technology and spatial relationships as residents of the old valleys of Huangbaiyu were relocated into the new eco-town.” Arriving in May 2005 she spent 18-months in Huangbaiyu as this project ratcheted up. A visit to her site allows a clearer picture of life in this small Liaoning village.
From a recent article by Ms. May in Counterpunch, Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China
Huangbaiyu could have lived up to the promise of eco-cities in the countryside—bridging the urban-rural divide while not contributing to ecological hazard. But for that to have been possible, sustainability would have had to begun from the premise that the lives and livelihoods of these rural residents were worth more than just their equivalence in carbon.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Mark Jungels // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:11 am
Don’t like to hear that. I knew McDonough was a little full of himself but one of his talks inspired Nell to go into chemical engineering to help design cleaner processes in the world.
2 jg // Feb 9, 2009 at 9:40 am
Sounds to me, Mark, that the ideas are good ones, though he, personally, becomes the problems to their realization – which seems to be a ‘missing of the point’ – while others around him scratch their heads and are left to hold the bag. Sounds more like a self-management problem, a guy with worthy goals who can’t help but interfere with seeing them through to fruition.
3 Expatriate Games // Feb 10, 2009 at 3:58 pm
To a degree, this kind of thing is happening all across China.
Although it is not on the same scale as the McDonough project, the complex I live in in Liuzhou (Guangxi) was touted as being some sort of uber modern facility. The problem is that most locals can’t afford to live here so many of the luxury hi-rises are less than 10 percent occupied. The facilities are not maintained at all and after just three years, many of the external building appear to be 20 to 30 years old.
4 Shannon May // Feb 10, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Jim,
If you’d like some more background on the Huangbaiyu case, you can find an extensive introduction on my website, where I’ve started putting up sections of my writing on the topic, and details from the project plans. http://www.shannonmay.com
I lived in Huangbaiyu for a year and a half, attending planning, design, and government meetings, farming, teaching, talking, and drinking.
Why anything goes awry is complicated, but the big push in the early 2000s for top-down eco-cities was certainly part of of the problem: all glamour, photographs, good pr, official government tours. And with so much governmental power and fame behind them, their designs were lauded as successes, before a single house or section of infrastructure was built or tested. Bill McDonough was already saying that he was working for the Chinese government (itself misleading) and building new cities when the designs were just on paper. In the end only Huangbaiyu moved forward.
The people hurt of course are the villagers who live there, whose government allotment of development projects got them this eco-town project, which has taken land, and left them with nothing usable.
Thanks for keeping those of us not currently in China connected.
5 jg // Feb 10, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Thanks for the comment, Shannon. I have amended/updated the original post to include a link to your site, as well as a link to your November 2008 essay in Counterpunch regarding Huangbaiyu.
6 George V Corr (Blatant News) // Jul 6, 2009 at 5:12 am
Cheers for passing on the info, we had added the “Waste=Food” documentary to our site recently, and pushed the value of Michael Braungart and William McDonough’s ideas, but now after hearing how McD is hoarding his ideas, for purely financial reasons, we are looking at running an article about that in particular. He should be more charitable towards his fellow humans, because his ideas could be eternally valuable to us all.
7 Chase Lucero // Oct 23, 2009 at 2:34 am
ALWAYS ASK AN ENGINEER FIRST!!!!!!!!
FIRST WE LEARN IN DESIGN 1 (before we go out to the real world and make yalls life work, yeah thats us it doesn’t just magically happen) IS YOU ASK THE CUSTOMER WHAT THEY WANT OR NEED!!!! IN FACT A KINDERGARDNER COULD TELL YOU THAT!!!
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