William McDonough
William McDonough
William Andrews McDonough is an American designer, advisor, author, and thought leader. McDonough is founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistrywith German chemist Michael Braungart as well as co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things and The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance, also with Braungart. McDonough's career is focused on creating a beneficial footprint. He espouses a message that we can design materials, systems, companies, products, buildings, and communities that...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth21 February 1951
CountryUnited States of America
If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.
I just think it is so delightful to see people, let their elbows free. I think the exuberance of it all is really exciting to me. It's a signal of the abundance of diversity and creative expression.
It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.
I'd so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.
I'd rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.
Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.
The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.
All these corporate reports say they want zero carbon. Well that is ridiculous, because you are not telling us what you are, you are telling us what you are not.
Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.
It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.
There are data saying that the economy is starting to recover, and there are data saying that it tends to be weak,
we (the Fed) will do what we have to do to maintain price stability.
I am very focused on large-scale deployments of renewable power and how we're going to get this done. Imagine our military bases covered with solar thermal collectors that could generate steam and electricity.
The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.