What are the obstacles to a full-scale embrace of renewables?
The biggest obstacles are short-term thinking and a short-term economic framework. As soon as you see some of the longer- term economic drivers become part of the short-term decision making, you can see the transformations. A really good example of the future in the present is Masdar, this new city that’s going to be built in Abu Dhabi. They’re investing billions of dollars in solar right now. When you see the oil countries investing in renewables, it’s a sure sign of something happening that relates to their perception of what the long-term situation will look like. It’s not to say that we’re running out of oil. It’s to say that there’s a new economic opportunity that can be taken advantage of. And it is now cost-effective thanks to the high price of oil.
You are bringing your philosophies such as Cradle to Cradle to China. How is that playing out?
Chinese leaders are concerned about the loss of farmland due to rapid urbanization. That’s why we, on a conceptual level, posited the idea of putting farms on the roofs in cities. These are concepts that are now sort of floating around in the consciousness of the design community. And I think what needs to happen in order for something like that to actually get built would be for the Chinese to recognize the dire nature of their circumstances and to see this as one of the options that they can take on.
Looking back at your career thus far, what do you consider your greatest successes?
Buildings such as the one at Oberlin College [the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies], which was an experiment—a tremendous amount of ambition for a really small project. Trying to make a building like a tree that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, produces more power than it needs to operate, and purifies its own water—things like that. That’s really been tremendously inspirational for us here. I think getting the Ford roof built was a big success. It was a testimony to putting together a huge team of people focused on the same thing.
Ford’s Rouge complex is huge—at one point it built nearly every part of the Model T. How do you approach such a massive project?
We approached it from a principles perspective. Instead of starting with goals or with tactics or conventional practice, we started with the idea that this was a place that was essentially an unhealthy workplace as a result of years of Industrial Revolution activities. And so we started with the idea of a healthy workplace. What would that be? From that principle grew the question of how would you have healthy water? How would you have healthy soil? How would you have healthy air? All of those pointed to the idea that you could use nature as the mechanism for creating those conditions. When we looked at the size of the roof, we said right now, as far as the planet is concerned, that would be a liability if it were an impervious surface. Because it would just create stormwater problems, it wouldn’t create habitat. It would create heat in the summer when you wanted cooling. It would perform all sorts of things, but it wouldn’t be regenerative. It would be degenerative.
It became clear to us that a large green roof would be a marvelous thing, because it would make oxygen, change colors with the seasons, protect the roof from thermal shock, absorb stormwater, absorb particulates, solve a lot of the problems that a regular roof wouldn’t even begin to address. And so the question became, could we afford it? That’s where we had to put a big team together and do research. We went to study the green roofs of Europe and essentially found that lightweight, low-maintenance green roofs had been developed in East Germany during the cold war as camouflage for aircraft hangars. We could import that technology because it was lightweight and cheap and apply it to an American industrial shed building.
What is so special about the East German roof design?
It’s only an inch and a half thick. And it’s made of exploded shale, so it’s stone with sedum growing in it. That’s a low-growing succulent plant, a noninvasive species that is very drought tolerant.
How are you applying what you’ve learned at Ford to your current projects, such as what you’re doing in China?
One way is that on large-scale projects we are now able to propose to clients that they use green roofs, because since we’ve had the opportunity to do one that big, we can say it’s possible. So that is giving license not just to us but to a whole profession, to propose large things like this, large-scale green roofs all over, which is really what we were hoping would happen as the result of our work.
What is an example of something you would do differently in the future?
The thing that I would do differently in a place like China is this: I would go for planted roofs with container gardening for food growing. The difference as we moved ahead is, we realized that not only could a roof absorb stormwater and things like that, but it could actually be a farm. I think the next generations of green roofs will be gardens and farms.
How do you see such urban farms working?
Well, they’ll require heavier weight, so it’s hard to do on lightweight, industrial, low-cost buildings. I think that we’ll see thin green roofs or solar collectors on lightweight industrial buildings. But then on residential buildings, where you already have the structure, I think we’ll see things like pot gardening, you know, big planters with vegetables and things growing in them.
