Thanks for the comment! Good to hear from you. Yeah, that Greenbuild experience was definitely unique. I’ll drop you a line via e-mail in the next day or two. Thanks again!

I was in the audience that day at the International Forum. I thought it was a fascinating interaction that certainly livened up the room and blew discussions about this project – and about construction reporting – wide open for me and many others. Having shifted gears a few years back from the international development realm to writing about green building for a major publisher, I was thrilled by the fallout conversations I heard throughout the rest of the day about the relationship between anthropology and design/construction. In my opinion, the close relationship between these disciplines is not discussed often enough, and is particularly critical as we work to grow the green building movement overseas. The attempt to improve livelihoods while ‘doing no harm’ is an intriguing and important dilemma that should be further integrated into the discourse about projects like this one and many others.

I’m heading to UAE next week – would be very interested in your take on the community developments at Masdar, SHAMS and others. Keep up the good work.

I do agree, it appears that the villagers have lost out more than anyone else. Certainly their loss is more poignant for their having been, essentially, innocent bystanders. My impression is that Dai, the village head/developer, has put a lot on the line, too, having invested most of the money behind this. I can’t imagine McDonough + Partners will be hurt in any substantial way by the fact that I did a story about a project they were involved in, one that was already known after being featured in national and global venues. I don’t know what the professional consequences of their role are in the U.S., China, or elsewhere.

But the villagers. They’ve lost good cropland, plowed under to make way for this development. That means less food, and lost income. They will miss any potential benefits, both environmental and economic, that a truly successful development might have brought. And you’re right: this is probably hindering any future development. Last year, Shannon May pointed out that regional officials probably won’t put any other projects in the village until this one is taken care of. She said that a nearby village got a factory and the accompanying jobs—development like that, potentially, is what could be at stake.

It sounds like you’ve got a good sense of what is needed and what is at stake in these kinds of projects based on your experiences, and I think that’s valuable both domestically and abroad. I hope you can share that perspective more.

And, no, this doesn’t put me off of architects. I’m very pleased with my story, and McDonough + Partners was just one part of the project. In the process, I’ve met a number of remarkable designers, developers, and architects. And, anyway, one of my best friends is an architect. I look forward to doing more stories about the amazing work that is out there.

@Peggy Ghozali: Thank you, too, for the note. I am interested to hear that about the web page. I don’t regularly check that page these days because a) it was down for about a year, and b) because I thought I’d moved on from the Huangbaiyu story. But this part of the story, it seems, continues. I look forward to sharing, at some point soon, some of Ms Dale’s comments to me on the exhibition floor, which help to shed more light on how this story has turned out.

I couldn’t say whether I’ll be hearing more from McDonough + Partners or not. If you’d asked me six months ago, I would have guessed against that, based on the firm’s declining to participate in my story. This web page and Ms Dale’s comments at the International Forum and on the exhibition floor are, in effect, turning this into what journalists somewhat euphemistically call a “two-day story.” That is, when the story might have stayed where we left it, they came forward with more material, generating more interest in the whole thing.