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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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William McDonough
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 20
Architect
Designer
Environmentalist
Writer
Tōkyō
William Andrews McDonough
Heal
System
Way
Eco
Surest
Connect

More quotes by William McDonough

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You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.
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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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?
William McDonough
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If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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How do we love all the children of all species for all time?
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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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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Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place
William McDonough
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Honor commerce as the engine of change.
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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Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.
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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Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.
William McDonough
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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.
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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If design is the first signal of human intention.
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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Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.
William McDonough
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If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.
William McDonough