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Essay on William McDonough "The Leader in Eco - Architecture"
William McDonough is a world-renowned architect and designer and winner of three U.S. presidential awards: the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), the National Design Award (2004); and the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003) (Biography of William McDonough). He is best known for designing environmentally sustainable buildings, manufacturing processes, and materials. McDonough's designs are also noteworthy for markedly increasing productivity and energy efficiency, as well as employee health and satisfaction (William McDonough, NNDB, 2005).
He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1951 and had spent most of his early years in populous Hong Kong. Therefore, he is an eyewitness to rampant urban squalor, poverty, and disease. The discrepancy between human needs, city infrastructure, and natural resources was further underscored during a period of intense drought when families had access to water for only a few hours a day, once every fourth day (William McDonough, NNDB, 2005). All this had greatly influenced McDonough.
In the summer’s, McDonough stayed with his grandparents out Washington state’s Puget Sound. Living in a log cabin, nestled amidst natural splendor and abundance, his grandparents modeled a life of prudent reuse and recycling (William McDonough, NNDB, 2005). Later, in his teen years, he moved to affluent Westport, Connecticut where he got his first real taste of the conspicuous consumer lifestyle, in which people "are" what they own, own far more than they need, and produce an alarming amount of throwaway for the landfill.
These disparate influences sensitized McDonough to the need for a more sustainable relationship between people, the economy, and the natural environment. Thus it was that when he entered college, he intended to do major in art where he fell in love with architecture. Architecture, according to him, "involved lots of people and expresses something important about human intention”. And human intention set the tone for human action, and interaction, with regard to one another and the planet (William McDonough, NNDB, 2005)....
