Each year, American colleges and universities hand out design degrees by the thousands.

Credentials in hand, an army of young architects and urban planners, engineers and product designers enter the job market and, with a little luck, begin to practice their professions. But what exactly is the “system” within which they are practicing? Have their college educations prepared them to be the designers of the 21st-century world?

These are not merely academic questions. Designers create the human environment. They make the objects we use, the places we live and work, our modes of communication and mobility. Simply put, design matters. And at a moment in our history when the scientific community has warned of some technologies’ negative consequences-global warming, water pollution, the loss of biodiversity and natural resources-designers have a crucial role to play in the creation of a more just, healthful, and sustainable world.

Our colleges, by and large, are not preparing design students for that challenge.

While design for sustainability is increasingly seen as an important element of both basic and specialized courses, we still have a long way to go. Consider, for example, the 2003 Metropolis magazine survey of more than 350 deans, department chairmen, and professors on the relevance of sustainability to design education. Although 67 percent of the respondents strongly agreed that sustainability is relevant to their design curricula, only 14 percent said their institutions were developing programs to educate their instructors about sustainable design. When asked how many graduate courses their department offered that included considerations of sustainability, 28 percent said none and 45 percent said they didn’t know.

That lack of focus on sustainability, of course, has a profound impact on professional practice: A separate Metropolis survey of practicing design professionals, conducted in 2002, found that 70 percent did not feel equipped to do a sustainable-design job.

The impact on our world is profound, as well. Instead of designs for buildings and products and manufacturing systems that effectively use energy and resources and generate a wealth of positive environmental, economic, and social effects, we get designs that reiterate the “take, make, and waste” sensibility of conventional industry. Instead of safe, healthful materials designed for many life cycles, we get toxic materials designed for a one-way trip to the landfill or incinerator. In short, conventional design tends to diminish the long-term health of human culture and the natural world on which it depends.

We can do much better.

The first step is to define sustainability and good design more clearly. What is it that we intend to teach young architects when we teach them about sustainable design? Typically, sustainability is used as a descriptive term for a range of cultural responses to the environmental and social impacts of economic growth. It is often defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainable design puts that sensibility into practice. Many approaches to “sustainable” architecture, for example, focus primarily on outlining strategies for building systems that make efficient use of energy and materials. Sustainable land planning and site design emphasize an environmentally responsive use of vegetation, water, and other natural systems.

Yet, while those strategies represent a marked improvement over conventional practice, they most often rely on minimizing human impact on the environment, striving only to be “less bad.” And “less bad” is not good enough for our young designers. A reductive approach to design may allow architects and manufacturers to use fewer resources, produce less waste, and minimize toxic emissions, but it does not change the fundamental design paradigm. As a result, many so¬called “sustainable” technologies use energy and materials within a conventional, cradle-to¬grave system. Although they dilute pollution and slow the loss of natural resources, they don’t deal with the design flaws that create waste and toxic products in the first place.

Thankfully, sustainable design is not limited to simply trying to be more efficient. A new approach offers a clear alternative: an ecologically intelligent framework in which the safe, regenerative productivity of nature provides models for wholly positive human designs. Within that framework, every material is designed to provide a wide spectrum of renewable assets. After a useful life as a healthful product, such cradle-to-cradle materials (as opposed to materials designed for a one-way trip from cradle to grave) either replenish the earth with biodegradable matter or supply high-quality resources for the next generation of products. When materials and products are created specifically for use within these closed-loop cycles¬the flow of biological materials through nature’s cycles and the circulation of industrial materials from producer to customer to producer-businesses can realize both enormous short-term growth and enduring prosperity. As well, we can begin to redesign the very foundations of architecture and industry, creating systems that purify air, land, and water; use current solar income and generate no toxic waste; and use only safe, healthful, regenerative materials. The benefits would enhance all life. Such a positive agenda can redefine design education. Rather than teach architecture students and designers how to reduce the impact of their work to meet today’s environmental standards, we should inspire them with an altogether different assignment:

Design industrial and architectural systems for the 21 st century that:
•introduce no hazardous materials into the air, water, and soil.
•measure prosperity by how much we enhance the positive effects of the human footprint.
•measure productivity by how many people are gainfully and meaningfully employed.
•measure progress by how many buildings have no smokestacks or dangerous effluents.
•do not require regulations whose purpose is to stop us from killing ourselves too quickly.
•produce nothing that will require future generations to maintain constant vigilance.
•generate more energy than they consume.
•make every building a life-support system.
•celebrate the abundance of biological and cultural diversity and renewable energy.

Colleges need to support students who engage in this revolutionary design assignment in the classroom. In the 1970s, when green architecture began to emerge in response to the energy crisis, most design students interested in creating solar-powered buildings found themselves working with faculty members who didn’t understand-and didn’t want to understand-the principles of ecologically intelligent design. In fact, one of my professors at Yale University, an architect well known for his sophisticated Modernist designs, went as far as to say that “solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.”

Vitruvius would have disagreed. The Roman master’s encyclopedic treatise on architecture, hugely influential in ancient times and again in the Renaissance, contained whole chapters on the profound significance of the sun’s movement in relation to the location of rooms, the size of apertures, and so on. A building insensitive to the movement of the sun would have left Vitruvius aghast.

But not the Modernists. Indeed, my professor’s rebuttal suggests just how far the Modernist project had divorced architecture from place and from the past. Following Le Corbusier, the Modernist ideal was “one single building for all nations and climates.” The house was to be “a machine for living in.” No need to understand local energy flows in that paradigm; just add fossil fuels. Style, too, was fiercely ideological, defined by the Bauhaus maxim, “Less is more.” Energetically applied, the “less is more” lens had a clarifying effect on architectural theory and practice, but as it calcified into academic rhetoric, its effect in the classroom was ultimately chilling. And so architecture students, their ideas dismissed by their teachers, often graduated and began to practice ecological design without a suitable aesthetic foundation. The results were less than handsome. Architects who designed solar-powered buildings typically delivered machines for living in with solar collectors on the roof. The devices were crude and utilitarian, and they did not really change the basic Modernist approach: same materials, same generally insensitive relationship to place and history, same ecological illiteracy.

The architecture critic Nikolaus Pevsner wrote that “a bicycle shed is a building” while a cathedral is “architecture.” The new solar buildings in the 1970s were seen as bicycle sheds, and, in fact, they were. That cast a shadow over ecological design for years, which meant that our colleges were not blessed with a new generation of faculty members capable of helping students pursue aesthetically rich designs that also express ecological intelligence.

The situation has begun to change. It is worth noting that even though only 14 percent of the design educators responding to the Metropolis survey said their colleges were developing sustainable-design curricula for instructors, 67 percent saw the relevance of sustainability to design education. Even 10 years ago that number would have been considerably smaller. Moreover, the work of prominent architects is now demonstrating that ecological design and aesthetic excellence create a wonderful synergy. Consider Norman Foster’s designs for the Commerzbank Tower, in Frankfurt; the Reichstag, in Berlin; and London’s new city hall, all of which combine a formally rich design sensibility with a keen sensitivity to the larger ecological context of architecture. As The New York Times has reported, for decades Foster has been “mining the expressive potential of low-energy construction” to create buildings “as elegant as any in the world.”

In the Commerzbank Tower, Foster created a 60-story atrium at the center of the building and built multistory sky gardens, replacing air conditioning with natural ventilation. The Reichstag’s domed assembly hall is also naturally ventilated, and its three-story shade follows the sun. The spherical shape of London’s city hall reduces the buildup of solar heat, keeping the building cool with far less energy than most structures of its size would require. As described in the Times, it should put to rest any lingering notion that an ecologically intelligent building is destined to be a bicycle shed: “In the gorgeous Assembly Chamber, an oculus of unusually transparent water¬white glass (regular glass has a slight greenish tint) opens the chamber northward through a diagonal fretwork of tubular-steel supports to a splendid vista of the Tower of London and London Bridge. The room is bathed in light as limpid and serene as a Vermeer painting. (This is also part of the low-energy scheme: the Assembly need switch on the lights only for nighttime and televised events.)”

Now, when students express interest in ecological design, not only is there no reasonable argument for dismissing their enthusiasm, but there are inspiring examples that they can emulate. But while that is a salutary change in the general atmosphere of design education, it is not enough to power a true transformation. The creativity unleashed by our new design assignment-which is really a lifetime design assignment-can be sustained in the classroom only when the classroom itself embodies the same values. As David W. Orr, professor and chair of the environmental-studies program at Oberlin College, has pointed out, architecture always serves a pedagogical function: The design of buildings teaches and reinforces how we use resources, how we relate to nature, and what our culture values. It is absurd, he believes, to teach young people about the world-especially young people interested in intelligently redesigning the world-in buildings that devour fossil fuels, have no relationship to their surroundings, are generally uncomfortable and uninspiring, and express ignorance of how nature works.

To redress the shortcomings of the contemporary classroom, Orr worked with my architecture firm, William McDonough + Partners, to design the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin, which teaches ecological intelligence rather than ecological illiteracy. Drawing the bulk of its power from solar energy, the Lewis center already has exceedingly low energy demands, and with additional solar panels it may one day produce more energy than it needs to operate. Its other sustainable-design features include geothermal wells, for heating and cooling; day lighting and fresh-air delivery throughout; an extended botanical garden that recovers nutrients from circulating water on-site; and a landscape that offers gathering spaces, instructional gardens and orchards, and a newly planted grove of native trees that has begun re-establishing the habitat of the building’s location.

The building and its classrooms provide opportunities for learning how nature and human industry can work together, the foundation of ecological literacy. Perhaps the most moving lesson that the building imparts is that the human presence in the landscape can be regenerative. Not simply benign or less bad, but positive, vital, and good. That is not a rhetorical lesson. At Oberlin habits of mind grow out of daily interactions with wind, water, soil, and trees as well as the workings of experimental building and energy systems. Those habits become the skills and knowledge that inform intelligent design.

Learning like this can be integrated into the curricula of many disciplines. Chemists aware of the concerns of sustainability can master the skills necessary to assess the environmental health and safety of industrial and architectural materials. “Green” engineers, who are employed throughout the sustainable-design process, can gamer the technical know-how to develop an array of sustainable systems, from solar-collection technology to chemical-recycling processes that allow the reuse of valuable materials. M.B.A. students who understand the value of design for the “triple top line”- the creation of ecological, economic, and social value through cradle-to-cradle product development-will generate extraordinary value for shareholders of the companies they go on to lead.

Although it will take time for colleges to change the way they construct buildings, they can begin now to revamp curricula so that they reflect the interdisciplinary values of a sustainable world. When young professionals knowledgeable about good sustainable design begin to practice, they can change the nature of “the possible.” Ten years ago, if a young architect walked into a firm and said, “I think we can build a green roof,” he would have met considerable resistance; there wasn’t a single green roof in North America. Now, however, thousands of architects have seen the multiple successful examples that have not only met budget and time restrictions but also have created a new way of thinking about the relationship between building and landscape. At Ford Motor Company’s new River Rouge manufacturing facility, for example, a I D¬acre green roof, which effectively filters storm-water runoff, saved millions of dollars in construction costs alone. When a young architect suggests a green roof today, his superiors know that some of the smartest firms are creating successful, cost¬effective versions of the same thing.

The very purpose and nature of learning should evolve from what is largely a celebration of human intelligence toward a sensibility that seeks to replace dominion over nature with a more fulfilling relationship between humanity and the natural world. This movement away from simple stewardship and toward a sense of kinship with life-what the biologist E. O. Wilson calls biophilia-is a source of creativity and deep learning. Our educational institutions, inasmuch as they support and nurture this new sensibility, can be home to the flowering of a 21st century that is known for prosperity, beauty, and the restoration of our world.