by Dan Levy, SF Gate
October 30th, 2005

William McDonough, architect, green guru and author of the eco-manifesto "Cradle to Cradle," is coming to San Francisco on Saturday and Sunday as part of the Green Festival at the Concourse Exhibition Center.

Green building is all the rage among consumers who want the comfort of knowing that the products they buy have been manufactured with a semblance of sustainability.

The green label applies to SUVs, appliances and cosmetics and now also to real estate.

Developers are increasingly marketing their buildings as green-certified for cutting back on nasty refrigeration gases, using paints and carpets that emit fewer chemicals, and recycling water and reducing its use.

But the Wall Street Journal showed in a recent report that the complicated certification process from the U.S. Green Building Council means that even a giant glass-and-steel office tower can pass a green test by installing bike racks and doing other marginally green maneuvers.

No matter, McDonough says. It's a start.

"The ultimate goal is to have practical, safe and healthy buildings that are powered directly or indirectly by renewable energy sources," McDonough said from the offices of William McDonough + Partners in Charlottesville, Va.

So far, McDonough's most significant green application has been the design of a new 10-acre roof for Ford Motor Co.'s famous River Rouge auto plant in Dearborn, Mich.

His office is also working on a design for VMWare Inc.'s proposed 500,000-square-foot headquarters in Palo Alto and advising a brownfield developer in North Carolina. In China, the world's most frenetic construction zone, McDonough's office is master- planning seven cities.

"We use commerce as the engine of change," he said. "The process has to be highly profitable or it won't happen. It's very businesslike. China is very businesslike."

For the roof of the huge Ford plant, the most important innovation was the use of captured storm water. McDonough's designers built a new storm water management system that retains a good portion of the annual rainfall. That helps decrease the building's energy costs as well as protect it from thermal shock and UV degradation.

"If you're doing wrong things in a more efficient way, you're still not changing the system," he said. "It all depends on what you're doing. We are trying to be more good instead of less bad.

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

SoMa Grand breaks ground

The SoMa Grand, a 246-unit condominium project on the site of a parking lot, broke ground last week on Mission Street between Seventh and Eighth streets.

It's a $120 million venture between developers AIG Capital and TMG, with Joie de Vivre Hospitality providing input on branding and lifestyle amenities.

"Our original vision was doing a commercial project with parking, but as the market dynamics changed we envisioned it as more residential," said Alexis Wong, chief executive of AIG Capital.

The company acquired the site in 2000 and saw it through the entitlement process before bringing aboard TMG and Joie de Vive.

One controversial aspect of the project was parking. More than 600 spaces were displaced and the city required partial compensation for the lost stalls.

So the building will have 184 spots for residents, less than a 1-to-1 ratio, and 320 available to the public in a four-story podium below the condo units.

However, the huge federal office tower is rising down the street at Mission and Seventh. That enormous building is going up with no added parking, meaning that it's clear who will have dibs on the SoMa Grand garage.