Green Bodhisattva

William McDonough's Cradle-to-Cradle Quest

by Michael Sibilia and photographs by Jason Cring, November 30, 2007

As a building contractor and journalist interested in sustainability, I routinely speak with people operating in areas of green building and other eco-friendly endeavors, and a couple of years ago, the name William McDonough began popping up among my colleagues. It was a name I hadn’t run across in my own research, and it came connected to claims that struck me as so wild they seemed almost like science fiction. Last year, I heard that McDonough would be speaking at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies, an ecological think tank in Millbrook, New York. I have to admit that the things I’d heard about him were so fantastical, they had kept me from investigating the man and his work any further. Nevertheless, I went to listen.

McDonough appeared in his signature black clothes and bow tie, to deliver a Zen-cool, often poetic slide presentation from a laptop. It’s easy to see why people fall for the guy. He has a fabulous command of the language and is a convincing and charismatic speaker. He cuts through mental clutter with disarmingly simple and grounded logic.

McDonough is widely considered one of the pioneers of green architecture. He’s a world-renowned architect and designer who’s won three US presidential awards: the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003), and the National Design Award (2004). Time magazine once named him a “Hero for the Planet.” He was born in Japan in 1951, and lived in Hong Kong before getting degrees from Dartmouth and the Yale School of Architecture, after which he opened an architecture office in New York City. In the 1980s, when global warming was little more than the obscure nightmare of a handful of climatologists, McDonough designed a solar-heated house in Ireland and a green office complex for the Environmental Defense Fund.