William McDonough Quotes

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 don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.

Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient."

The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.

If design is the first signal of human intention.

The problem carbon is that everyone thinks we have an energy problem, we don't. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. Carbon is a material, so we have a material problem, not an energy problem.

In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'

Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.

So when you see a regulation against lead, because lead is a bad in a regulators mind, what does that mean? You are not telling us what is good, you are just tell us what you don't want, not what you do want.

We realized we don't have an invention, that's why we gave it away.

Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.

We are not a green standard, we are a quality standard. We're different, we're multi dimensional.

Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.

And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?

Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

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.

This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.

If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.

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.

If you don't like carbon, if you want to be zero carbon, then you might as well shoot yourself, dry up and blow away because you are carbon.

We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem

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.

The eco-effective future of industry is a world of abundance that celebrates the use and consumption of products and materials that are, in effect, nutritious - as safe, effective, and delightful as a cherry tree.

I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.

It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.

Honor commerce as the engine of change.

Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!

Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

We have carbon in the atmosphere. That is a material in the wrong place problem. It's just like what I said about the lead. Lead in the biosphere is not good. Carbon in the atmosphere (over natural levels) is a problem.

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

You need that same creative force that exists in a building like Disney [Walt Disney Concert Hall] to actually tackle that most prosaic of problems.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.

How do we love all the children of all species for all time?

Modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, I didn't intend to cause global warning, it's not part of my plan, then we realize it's part of our defacto plan because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan.

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.

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.

We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?

It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.

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.

We are proposing buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste, water and release it slowly in a purer form.

I am working right at both the levels- with the most wealthy clients in the world, but also the poorest. I spend half my time designing for people that have nothing.

In planetary terms, we're all downstream.