William McDonough

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For other persons named William McDonough, see William McDonough (disambiguation).

William A. McDonough (1951, Tokyo, Japan - ) is an American architect and founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, whose career is focused on designing environmentally sustainable buildings and transforming industrial manufacturing processes, with the twin goals of eliminating pollution and increasing the profits of his clients.

McDonough was born in Tokyo as the son of an American Seagram's executive, and trained at Dartmouth College and Yale University. In 1981 McDonough founded his practice, and his first major commission was the 1984 Environmental Defense Fund Headquarters. According to a profile in Metropolis Magazine, the EDF told him he would be sued if any employees became sick from noxious elements in the construction material; when McDonough asked his suppliers to provide him with a list of chemicals in their products, he was told it was proprietary information.

A number of large corporate projects for The Gap, Nike, and Herman Miller, all of which were successful from both a financial and environmental standpoint, led to his commission for a 20 year, $2 billion environmental re-engineering of the Ford Motor Company's legendary River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, a project that included rolling out the world's largest extensive "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. The sedum retains and cleanses rain water, as well as moderating the internal temperature of the building, for additional energy savings. The roof is part of an $18 million rainwater treatment system designed to clean 20 billion US gallons (76,000,000 m³) of rainwater annually, and sparing Ford from a $50 million mechanical treatment facility. McDonough is also working with Ford to develop the first entirely recyclable production car. Two prototypes of this vision are the Ford Model U and Ford Reflex concept cars.

In 1996 McDonough became the first and only individual recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development. In 1999 Time Magazine called him "Hero for the Planet". In 2002 he wrote (with Michael Braungart) "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things". He received a National Design Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 2004. As of 2005 McDonough is pursuing urban design work for the Chinese government including a model village, Huangbaiyu, that is in northeast China near Benxi.

[edit] Published works

  • Braungart, Michael; & McDonough, William (2002). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point Press. ISBN 0-86547-587-3. This book, true to its philosophy, was not printed on conventional paper, but in Durabook (patent 6,773,034, a trademark of Melcher Media, Inc.) a synthetic "paper" made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers, that is, a material that can be reutilized again and again in industrial processes, what the book calls a "technical nutrient", the kind of non-waste-producing material the book is arguing for.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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