William McDonough

American architect

William McDonough (born 21 February 1951) 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.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: William Andrews McDonough

From Wikidata (CC0)

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I can't imagine something being beautiful at this point in history if it's destroying the planet or causing children to get sick. How can anything be beautiful if it's not ecologically intelligent at this point?

If you look at a tree and think of it as a design assignment, it would be like asking you to make something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy's fuel, makes complex sugars and food, changes colors with the seasons, creates microclimates, and self-replicates.

If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.

There's probably 5000 times more solar energy than the humans will ever need. We could cover our highways with solar collectors to make ribbons of energy, and I think that it's really the largest job creation program in the history of the planet that's in front of us. It's a celebration of the abundance of human creativity combined with the abundance of the natural world.