William McDonough

Early life

McDonough was born in Tokyo and spent most of his childhood in Hong Kong where his father was a foreign service officer. Later, his father was a Seagram executive and his family lived in Canada and Westport, Connecticut. He says the move caused "profound culture shock".

McDonough attended Dartmouth College. After graduating, he worked on the Jordan River valley redevelopment project and lived in a Bedouin tent. He studied architecture at Yale University in the mid-1970s. To fund his college education, he worked as a chauffeur for Benny Goodman.

Career

McDonough founded an architectural practice in New York City in 1981. He moved his practice, William McDonough + Partners, to Charlottesville, Virginia in 1994 when he accepted the position of the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He served as dean until 1999 and has since been a professor of business administration and an alumni research professor.

McDonough centers his work on cradle-to-cradle design, a philosophy defined in his firm's 2002 book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. The goal of cradle-to-cradle design is to shift thinking from doing "less bad" to being "more good".

In 2002, he was the subject in The Next Industrial Revolution, a documentary directed by Christopher Bedford and Shelley Morhaim.

McDonough's architecture firm's designs are mostly categorized as green architecture or sustainable architecture, often using solar and passive energy efficiency techniques. This type of architecture is not known for its distinctive visual style but instead for minimizing the negative environmental impact of a building. McDonough says he aspires to design something like a tree, something that creates good, like oxygen, rather than minimizing negative impact.

McDonough co-founded the Make It Right Foundation with Brad Pitt to rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in 2007. In 2008, McDonough was a senior advisor and Venture Partner at VantagePoint Capital Partners, one of the largest venture capital investors in clean technology.

On May 20, 2010, at Google's Googleplex, McDonough announced the launch of the Green Products Innovation Institute, a non-profit public/private collaboration which was later renamed the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. Executives from Google, Walmart, YouTube, Shaw Inc., and Herman Miller Inc. joined McDonough for the announcement. Located in Charlottesville, Virginia, the institute builds on the 2008 California state law establishing the nation's first green chemistry program.

At the January 2014 World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, McDonough led a workshop for CEOs that was centered around sustainable design, with an added focus on cradle-to-cradle, the upcycle, and the circular economy. Before the meeting, he participated in the organizing process in Geneva, when the WEF partnered with the United Nations to review climate change. McDonough was appointed chair of the forum's Meta-Council on Circular Economy in July 2014. He addressed the Arctic Circle China Forum in Shanghai in May 2019.

He is a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council. He is also the chief executive of McDonough Innovation, which provides consulting to global companies, organizations, and governments.[[File:901cherryave.jpg|thumb|right|220px|YouTube Headquarters, 901 Cherry Avenue, San Bruno, California]]

Projects

McDonough's first major commission was the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Headquarters in New York City in 1984. The EDF's requirement for good indoor air quality exposed McDonough to the importance of sustainable development. Since then, William McDonough + Partners has been responsible for numerous milestones in the sustainable movement, such as 901 Cherry Avenue in San Bruno, California, completed in 1997 for Gap, Inc.; it is now the headquarters for YouTube. The building features a 70000 sqft green roof that helps to prevent water runoff, insulates the building from noise, and provides a habitat for several species. It received the BusinessWeek/Architectural Record Design Award in 1998.

Other corporate projects include buildings for Gap Inc., Nike, and Herman Miller. The Herman Miller SQA factory in Michigan includes a series of manmade wetlands that process and purify the building’s stormwater. Set on 37 acre, the 295,000 sqft building is often called the GreenHouse.

He also received a commission for an environmental re-engineering of the River Rouge Plant for Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. This project took twenty years and cost US$2 billion. The River Rouge Plant now includes the world's largest living roof; the 1,100,000 sqft roof is covered with more than 10 acre of sedum.

His Flow House, designed for the Make It Right Foundation in New Orleans in 2009, incorporates solar and other passive energy designs such as deep overhangs and multiple connections with exterior areas that allow for daylight and natural ventilation. It also has roof-mounted solar panels, water cisterns to harvest rainwater runoff, and rain gardens to absorb any storm runoff.

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

In 2014, McDonough and his firm developed a master plan for Park 20|20, the first large-scale urban development in the Netherlands to adopt the cradle-to-cradle philosophy.

Completed works

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 magazine cited his failure to have any meaningful impact with his cradle-to-cradle program, his unsustainable suburban lifestyle, and his habit of misrepresenting his professional successes. It also noted that just 160 of his planned 30,000 products were green-certified, and that he trademarked the term "cradle-to-cradle" even though it was coined by Swiss architect Walter Stahel many years beforehand.

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

Awards and honors

In 1996, McDonough became the first individual recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development. In 1999, Time called him "Hero for the Planet". In 2004, he received a National Design Award for environmental design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

In 2013, Stanford University Libraries began the William McDonough "Living Archive". At the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he received the Fortune Award for Circular Economy Leadership for his outstanding contribution to the development of a prosperous and sustainable economy.

Fortune named McDonough one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders in 2019 in recognition of his contributions to the green building movement, being a leading proponent of the circular economy, and his efforts to redesign plastics. He was also profiled by Vanity Fair, Discover, and Time.

Publications

• McDonough, William and Braungart, Michael. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point Press, 2002.
• McDonough, William and Braungart, Michael. The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability - Designing for Abundance. North Point Press, 2013.
• William McDonough. "Carbon Is Not the Enemy." Nature 539 (November 2016): 349–351.

References

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