TIME MAGAZINE – TED THAI FOR TIME

He believes the world needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up, in a "next industrial revolution." That means everything from products to buildings to cities to "definitions of beauty" and constructs of the human mind. Beauty, he says, embodies function. A beautiful woman who harms you is not beautiful; a beautiful building that spews fumes and spreads cancer is not beautiful. "How do we love all children?" means "How can we look seven generations into the future if we leave behind the detritus of this designer society?" "For a strategy of change," he says, "we need a strategy of hope."

 The truth is that McDonough isn't an architect at all, or is only occasionally an architect. In collaboration with his friend German chemist Michael Braungart, he has begun or completed designs for nontoxic shower gels, fabrics that do not contain mutagens or carcinogens, dolls made without PVCs, biodegradable yogurt cartons, and a recyclable Nike sneaker made with soles that, when they disintegrate, will serve as nutrients for the soil. Among the larger projects, besides the Gap building, are the Nike European Headquarters, an environmental-studies center at Oberlin College that will produce more energy than it consumes, the Monsanto Child Development Center in Missouri, and a new community in Indiana called Coffee Creek Center, which will work against suburban sprawl by establishing a compact and pleasant small town.

 "In Oberlin, we asked, How can we design a building like a tree?--a fecund structure that purifies waters and makes oxygen and food," he says. "In Coffee Creek, we asked, What if a town were like a forest?" He envisions the Indiana project as the first step toward creating "a green world with connecting gray zones."

 The caution here is one that applies to utopian visions generally: perfect is always imperfect, as it must be, and imperfect--a world of disappointments and surprises--is as good as it gets. It is hard to know whether McDonough recognizes this. He is in the first blush of success, where he wants everything to be right and believes it is possible. He asks, "Why should it ever be necessary to tear the Gap complex down?" and thinks that the question is rhetorical.

 We walk through the building's halls and hear no noise anywhere. The colors surrounding us are muted tones; everything has the feel of khaki, even the fluorescent indirect lighting that McDonough deliberately made warm "to make people look better to one another." Walls display some of the art collection of Donald G. Fisher, Gap's founder and board chairman. And there are small, tidy visual jokes played against the pervasive serenity. One of Fisher's paintings spells out the word RIOT at the farthest end of the hallway. The F was left off the sign on the vault of a fire valve, which now reads, IRE VALVE.