Great Throughts Treasury

"A building should be like a tree, it should thrive on the Sun?s energy while enhancing its surroundings."

"Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do."

"Commerce on the other hand is relatively quick essentially creative, highly effective and efficient and fundamentally honest because we can't exchange value for very long if we don't trust each other So we use the tools of commerce primarily for our work but the question we bring to it is "How do we love all the children of all species for all time?" So we start our designs with that question Because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy If we come here and say well I didn't intend to cause global warming on my way here ? it?s not part of my plan Then we realize that it's part of our De facto plan Because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan So if you don't have an end game of something delightful then you're just moving chess pieces around if you don't know you've taken the king So perhaps we can develop a strategy of change that involves humility So as Kevin Kelly pointed out There is no end game, there's an infinite game And we're playing in that infinite game and so we call it Cradle to Cradle Our Goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power -economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed-Period! Which part of this don't you like?"

"Design is a signal of intention."

"And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?"

"Art is about going a little nuts... Kids do art for fun. It's playing."

"Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power."

"Design is the first signal of human intention."

"Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place."

"Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions."

"Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!"

"Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good."

"Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth?s greenings. Now, think."

"Honor commerce as the engine of change."

"I can't imagine something being beautiful at this point in history if it's destroying the planet or causing children to get sick. How can anything be beautiful if it's not ecologically intelligent at this point?"

"How sophisticated are we as designers? If we think about humility and design, it is unfortunate that the word humble and the word architect have not appeared together since The Fountainhead. But, I think if anybody here has trouble with the concepts of design humility; just reflect on the fact that it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage. We are not that smart. And we have a big job ahead of us here.Well, how we get to do these things, and things like the largest green rose in the world, and buildings that are starting to act like living things like trees? Imagine the design that makes all oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energies as fuel, makes complex sugars in food, and creates microclimates and self-replicates. How many of our buildings have made oxygen lately? So the goal as a human artifice would connect itself once again with the natural world and it would become a propitious and productive, meaningful part of it."

"How do we love all the children of all species for all time?"

"I suggest we take our heads out of the tar sands and look up to see the sun. We don't own it, but it provides us all with great, endless value. So, too, the wind. These free, renewable sources of 'energy currency' are perfect partners to what we own together."

"I am very focused on large-scale deployments of renewable power and how we're going to get this done. Imagine our military bases covered with solar thermal collectors that could generate steam and electricity."

"I think the job of an original designer is to inspire."

"I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence."

"If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage."

"I see that idea that we need a new form as something critical. I mean, we do need to invent and not be benchmarking all the time. That's important to me."

"If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever."

"In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'"

"If you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure. People will question your actions."

"In planetary terms, we're all downstream."

"Not everything needs to be recycled."

"Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power ? economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed."

"Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality."

"Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'"

"If you look at a tree and think of it as a design assignment, it would be like asking you to make something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy's fuel, makes complex sugars and food, changes colors with the seasons, creates microclimates, and self-replicates."

"Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient." Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things -- on the right products and services and systems -- instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense."

"Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point."

"The average lawn is an interesting beast: people plant it, then douse it with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides to make it grow and to keep it uniform-all so that they can hack and mow what they encouraged to grow. And woe to the small yellow flower that rears its head!"

"The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live."

"The eco-effective future of industry is a world of abundance that celebrates the use and consumption of products and materials that are, in effect, nutritious - as safe, effective, and delightful as a cherry tree."

"The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself."

"Ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure...it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an acceptable rate."

"The conventional design criteria is a tripod: Can we profit from it? the company asks. Will the customer find it attractive? And will it work? Champions of "sustainable development" like to use a "triple bottom line" approach based on the tripod of Ecology, Equity, and Economy... But in practice we find that it often appears to center only on economic considerations, with social or ecologic benefits considered as an afterthought rather than given equal weight at the outset. Businesses calculate their conventional economic profitability and add what they perceive to be the social benefits, with perhaps, some reduction in environmental damage... The real magic results when industry begins with all these questions, addressing them up front as "triple top line" questions rather than turning to them after the fact. ... In fact, often a project that begins with pronounced concerns of Ecology or Equity (How do I create habitat? How do I create jobs?) can turn out to be tremendously productive financially in ways that would never have been imagined if you'd started from a purely economic perspective."

"The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal."

"To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist."

"There's probably 5000 times more solar energy than the humans will ever need. We could cover our highways with solar collectors to make ribbons of energy, and I think that it's really the largest job creation program in the history of the planet that's in front of us. It's a celebration of the abundance of human creativity combined with the abundance of the natural world."

"We achieved our mission to the moon. Let's look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth - that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions."

"Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle."

"We are all born artists... Almost everything kids do is art."

"We are proposing buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste, water and release it slowly in a purer form."

"We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem"

"We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?"

"We get jealous not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us."