William Andrews McDonough (born February 20, 1951) is an American architect and academic. McDonough is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners and was the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He works in green and sustainable architecture, often incorporating his theory of cradle-to-cradle design.
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". Since 1995, his primary design partner is the German chemist Michael Braungart; the Charlottesville practice also included 49 associates in 2009.
The 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.
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 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 , the building is often called the GreenHouse.
