William McDonough

William Andrews McDonough is an American architect, designer, and author. McDonough is founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, co-founder of McDonough MBDC, and co-author of '' Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things'' and ''The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance.'' McDonough has focused his career on creating a beneficial footprint. He espouses the idea that it is possible to design materials, systems, companies, products, buildings, and communities that continuously improve over time.

Biography

McDonough was born in Tokyo. He was the son of an American Seagram executive, and attended Dartmouth College and Yale University. In 1981, McDonough founded his architectural practice. His first major commission was the 1984 Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Headquarters. The EDF's requirement of good indoor air quality in the structure exposed McDonough to the importance of sustainable development.

McDonough's architecture practice, William McDonough + Partners, operates in Charlottesville, Virginia. McDonough moved his practice from New York City to Charlottesville in 1994 when he was appointed as the Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He served as Dean until 1999 and has since served as a professor of business administration and an alumni research professor. He is chief executive of McDonough Innovation, which provides high-level consulting to global companies, organizations, and governments, and he co-founded the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. He is also co-founder of MBDC, based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A number of large corporate projects for The Gap, Nike, and Herman Miller led to his commission for a 20-year, US$2 billion environmental re-engineering of the Ford Motor Company's iconic River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan. The project included rolling out the world's largest "living roof" in October 2002. The roof of the 1.1 million square foot (100,000 m²) Dearborn truck assembly plant was covered with more than 10 acres (40,000 m²) of sedum, a low-growing ground cover.

In 1996, McDonough became the first and only individual recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development. In 1999 ''Time'' called him "Hero for the Planet". In 2002 he co-authored '' Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things''. In 2004, he received a National Design Award for environmental design from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.

McDonough was also a senior advisor and Venture Partner at VantagePoint Capital Partners, one of the largest venture capital investors in clean technology.

Design philosophy

William McDonough and his architecture and urban design firm, William McDonough + Partners, ground their work in Cradle to Cradle Design, a philosophy developed in the 2002 book, '' Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things''. The goal is to frame design as "a beneficial, regenerative force—one that seeks to create ecological footprints to delight in, not lament." The primary goal of Cradle to Cradle Design is to shift thinking from doing "less bad" to being "more good". McDonough has also articulated the Cradle to Cradle Design framework as The Five Goods™ (Good Materials, Good Economy, Good Energy, Good Water, Good Lives) to help companies focus and evaluate their efforts on becoming "more good". The Five Goods were also designed to offer a streamlined method of addressing each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The firm's designs are often categorized as green architecture or sustainable architecture. The concept, closely linked with green building, is not known for a distinctive visual style, but instead for minimizing the negative environmental impact of a building. McDonough, however, is often quoted as saying the aspiration is to design something like a tree, something that creates good, like oxygen, rather than minimizing negative impact. McDonough's designs use solar and other passive energy efficiency techniques, as illustrated by th
Flow House
designed for the Make It Right Foundation New Orleans. The design incorporates deep overhangs, multiple connections with exterior areas allowing for much daylight and natural ventilation, roof mounted PV panels, water cisterns to harvest rainwater runoff and rain gardens to absorb any storm runoff.

In 1984, McDonough and his colleagues designed the Environmental Defense Fund office in New York City. Since then, William McDonough + Partners has been responsible for other milestones in the movement, such as 901 Cherry Avenue in San Bruno, California, completed in 1997 for Gap, Inc.; it is now home to Google's YouTube. The building features a green roof that helps to prevent water runoff, insulates the building from noise, and provides a habitat for several species, and received the BusinessWeek/Architectural Record Design Award in 1998. The Bernheim Arboretum Visitor Center for the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, in Clermont, Kentucky, completed in 2005, blurs the line between outdoor and indoor space. This project, like others designed by William McDonough + Partners, draws heavily on the biophilia hypothesis—the study of the human desire and physiological need for contact with nature. The building was awarded the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum rating.

Together with his architecture firm, McDonough developed a master plan for the design of Park 20, 20, the first large-scale urban development in the Netherlands that adopts the Cradle to Cradle philosophy.

William McDonough co-founded the Make It Right Foundation New Orleans with Brad Pitt. This is an effort to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

Dedicated in 2012, the NASA Ames Research Center's Sustainability Base is designed to harvest more energy than it needs to operate and to cleanse its own water. It was designed to meet a conventional budget and tight timeline, be a test bed for NASA technologies, and it exceeds LEED Platinum metrics. The facility is designed to "learn"—and continuously improve—over time.

McDonough addressed the Arctic Circle China Forum in Shanghai and laid out a framework for how to "bring back breathing cities" in May 2019. This system seeks to avoid focusing on releasing less carbon and fewer toxic chemicals into the air and instead shifts to integrating renewable energy such as geothermal as a transformative solution to air pollution and climate change. This vision encourages cities to break out of the urban linear flow of "take, make, waste" and embrace a circular flow of "take, make, retake, remake, restore" to implement a Circular Carbon Economy.

In June 2019 William McDonough delivered a keynote address at Sustainable Brands on "A Bold New Vision for the Collection, Processing, Circularity and Productivity of Plastic Waste". As a step toward solving the plastics crisis, McDonough directed the audience to "refuse refuse", or reject plastics which are not reusable, recyclable, compostable, and recoverable.

Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program

On May 20, 2010, at Google Corporate Headquarters, the Googleplex, McDonough announced the launch of the Green Products Innovation Institute, which was later renamed the "Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute". The Institute builds on the 2008 California state law that establishes the nation's first green chemistry program. The non-profit public/private Institute has received the Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program on an exclusive, worldwide basis to accelerate the transition to safe material use and increased material reutilization. Executives from Google, Walmart, YouTube, Shaw Inc., and Herman Miller Inc. joined McDonough for the announcement.

The Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Products Program is based on five attributes, Material Health, Circular Economy, Renewable Energy, Water Stewardship, and Social Fairness. On June 18, 2019, McDonough delivered a plenary at GreenBiz's inaugural Circularity '19 conference, where he spoke about the program encouraging a safe then circular economy to prevent recirculating harmful chemicals, which he refers to as retox.

World Economic Forum

At the January 2014 World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, William McDonough led the first CEO workshop that was centered around sustainable design, with an added focus on Cradle to Cradle, The Upcycle, and the circular economy. Prior to the 2014 meeting, McDonough participated in the organizing process in Geneva, when the WEF partnered with the United Nations to review the issue of climate change. It was later determined that climate change and the circular economy would be the main focus of the 2014 WEF meeting.

McDonough was appointed as Chair of the Forum's Meta-Council on Circular Economy in July 2014.

Reception

In May 2008, Vanity Fair magazine offered an extensive profile of McDonough, which included a close look at several of his clients and projects, in the piece "Industrial Revolution, Take Two". Similar profiles about McDonough and his work have been published by the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', ''Discover Magazine'', and ''Time'' magazine.

In 2013, Stanford University Libraries began the William McDonough "Living Archive".
Stanford University Libraries will also host the William A. McDonough Archive (WAMA).
This will be a first of a kind, real-time "Living Archive".

He was recognized at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as the recipient of the Fortune Award for Circular Economy Leadership for outstanding contribution to the development of a prosperous and sustainable economy.

McDonough was named as one of Fortune Magazine's World's 50 Greatest Leaders in 2019 at number 24 in recognition of his contributions to the green building movement, being a leading proponent of the circular economy and his efforts to redesign plastics.

Criticism

After being named one of Fast Company Magazine's "Masters of Design" in 2004, the same magazine followed up in 2008 with a more critical look at McDonough entitled "Green Guru Gone Wrong." Interviewing many of McDonough's former colleagues, the author cited McDonough's failure to have any meaningful impact with his "cradle to cradle" program (certifying just 160 of his planned 30,000 products), his entirely unsustainable suburban lifestyle, his habit of misrepresenting his professional successes, and that he trademarked the term "cradle to cradle" despite that it was coined by Swiss architect Walter Stahel many years beforehand.

In 2008 McDonough's Huangbaiyu project was also heavily covered for its many design issues. Some of the design issues raised included conflicts between Feng Shui and passive solar design standards, appending garages although no villagers can afford cars, failing to provide space for grazing livestock, and building the houses out of potentially unsafe compressed coal dust. In 2008, a PBS Frontline investigation found that McDonough's poor planning and execution of the project had doomed it to failure from the start.

Completed works

* 901 Cherry Office Building in San Bruno, California the current headquarters of YouTube
*Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies
*American University School of International Service
*Bernheim Arboretum Visitor's Center located at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Clermont, Kentucky
* BSH Hausgeräte Office, Park 20, 20
* Ford River Rouge Complex
* Fuller Theological Seminary Library
*NASA Sustainability Base
*Nike European Headquarters
* VMware Corporate Campus

Published works

* Braungart, Michael; & McDonough, William (2002). '' Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things''. North Point Press.
* Braungart, Michael; & McDonough, William (2013). '' The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability - Designing for Abundance''. North Point Press.
* William McDonough (2016) Carbon is not the enemy, ''Nature'' 539, 349–351 (November 17, 2016)

See also

* Hannover Principles
* Sustainable design
* Ecological modernization

References

External links

* William McDonough (2004)
21st Century Design
(accessed March 26, 2008)]

''Balancing Economy, Equity, and Ecology Through Design''
- a speech given on October 15, 2008, for Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner, with both audio & video

Fast Company: This 'Green Dean' Has a Blueprint for Sustainability

The Next Industrial Revolution
a Documentary film about William McDonough and Michael Braungart]

Video of speech given at GreenBiz 2018 conference

TED Talks: William McDonough on cradle to cradle design
at TED (conference), TED in 2005

Interview with CNN's John Defterios at World Government Summit 2019


2003 interview of McMcDonough in the ''Princeton Independent''

Circular Economy: William McDonough + TriCiclos in Chile
(video)

William McDonough Champions Sustainable Design With the Circular Economy
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:McDonough, William
1951 births
American architects
American non-fiction environmental writers
Dartmouth College alumni
Living people
Solar building designers
Sustainability advocates
University of Virginia faculty
Yale School of Architecture alumni
Yale University alumni