McDonough Receives Top Environmental Design Award

New York, NY, October 21--Environmental leader, architect and designer William McDonough received a prestigious National Design Award for exemplary achievement in the field of environmental design. Initiated in 2000 to honor major achievements in American design, the National Design Awards are presented annually by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, The award recognizes "excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement" and is the nation's highest design honor. McDonough and his companies are widely known for defining the leading edge of sustainable design. The designs honored by this award demonstrate tangible methods for achieving environmental progress, by design, with conventional budgets and commercial timelines. Practicing a new conception of design -- described as cradle-to-cradle design -- McDonough and his companies go beyond retrofitting industrial systems to reduce the damage they create. Cradle-to-cradle design offers a framework in which the effective, regenerative cycles of nature provide models for wholly positive human designs -- an approach being perceived by business as the next step in the Total Quality Management movement. McDonough's work includes the first "green office" in the United States for Environmental Defense (ED) in New York (1985); offices for Gap Inc. in San Bruno, California that feature an undulating green roof (1993); the revitalization of Ford Motor Company's historic Rouge Center industrial complex, home to the world's largest green roof (2003) and the Herman Miller 'Mirra' office chair (2003). In 2003 McDonough received a Presidential Award in Green Chemistry for Shaw Inc.'s ecoworx carpet McDonough is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners. Along with Partners Russell Perry, Kevin Burke, Diane Dale and Allison Ewing, the design firm is practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent architecture and planning in the U.S. and abroad. He is also the co-founder and principal, with German chemist Michael Braungart, of MBDC, a product and process design firm assisting companies to design profitable and ecologically intelligent products and systems. Both companies are based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Related Topics:Shaw Industries Group, Inc.

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