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

William McDonough

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William McDonough
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 20
Architect
Designer
Environmentalist
Writer
Tōkyō
William Andrews McDonough
Trying
Good
Redesign
Figuring
Earnest
Begins
Stop
Start
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More quotes by William McDonough

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The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.
William McDonough
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It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.
William McDonough
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Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place
William McDonough
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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
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.
William McDonough
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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!
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough