
As a young boy, William McDonough lived in a traditional minka house handcrafted from pine rafters with bamboo beams, straw tatami, and rice paper walls in Tokyo. He watched the gardener cut grass with a sickle and hand feed the fish. Every night the rattle of a farmer’s oxcart collecting sewage woke him up, and his mother soothed him back to sleep with a song about honey wagons taking night soil away to grow food for the next day. His parents often took young Bill and his siblings to see the fields of rice and vegetables their “night soil” helped produce.
It was McDonough’s first lesson in circular economy, a concept the designer, author, pioneering “starchitect,” globally recognized leader in sustainable development, and winner of the 2017 Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainability would become famous for fostering.
McDonough had designed the first solar house in Ireland while he was a graduate student at Yale University and had established himself as a green architect with boundary-pushing buildings such as the Environmental Defense Fund’s national headquarters when the city of Hannover, Germany, commissioned him to craft a set of sustainable design principles that it presented as a gift to the 1992 Earth Summit’s World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
McDonough’s manifesto was later published as The Hannover Principles, a slim volume that helped launch a movement and remains on most sustainable design professionals’ shelves today. “They still hold, you know,” McDonough says.
The Hannover Principles paved the way for Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which McDonough wrote with German chemist Michael Braungart in 2002 to provide a framework for creating what they call “biological and technical nutrients,” products that can be returned to the soil or endlessly upcycled. In 2009, the partners co-founded the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, a nonprofit that certifies goods that meet C2C specifications.
C2C is making headway. Walmart recognizes the program as aligning with its commitment to reduce its consumables’ chemical footprint. The concept is being embodied in a 20,000-square-meter academic building with a perpetually reusable and recyclable space-frame shade structure designed by McDonough’s Charlottesville, Va.–based architecture firm William McDonough + Partners for the Universidad EAN in Bogota, Colombia, and in Park 20/20, a development outside of Amsterdam. McDonough says he will use the Hanley Award’s $50,000 prize to continue his team’s research into how designers, developers, and builders can integrate C2C design into their projects.

McDonough “is single-handedly responsible for setting the modern green building movement in motion, from designing the first green office for the Environmental Defense Fund, serving as the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, establishing the Cradle to Cradle Certified Products Program, and, most recently, helping the World Economic Forum make sustainability a primary focus for its agenda,” says Michael J. Hanley, president of the Hanley Foundation.
Like Thomas Jefferson, whose home he lived in as the “green dean” of the University of Virginia School of Architecture from 1994 to 1999, McDonough says he would plot his own tombstone—to highlight what he “caused to be” in the world. McDonough would list the Hannover Principles, Cradle to Cradle, and his two children. He lives by a mantra: “Design is the first signal of human intention.” First and foremost, he considers himself a designer.
C2C is the design framework for a circular economy, he says, but the structure fails if humans continue to put in “bads” like atmospheric carbon and toxic materials. It brings him joy to watch people get this simple concept through his books and speeches. “When you finish reading the book, you think, ‘Well, that was obvious,’ but four and a half hours earlier, it wasn’t obvious at all,” he says. “I call it discovering the obvious, and that is rhetoric. You made the argument. A big part of this is the discovery.”

It happened for Steven Zornetzer, associate center director for research and technology at California’s NASA Ames Research Center, when he heard McDonough speak in 2009. Two weeks earlier, Zornetzer had squashed an unimaginative design for a new building at NASA Ames and declared his center would create “the greenest building in the federal government.” Following McDonough’s speech, Zornetzer invited the designer to coffee and dangled the project in front of him. Sparked by the connection between C2C and a space station’s closed-loop systems, McDonough proclaimed he would design “the first lunar base on planet Earth.”
The result, Sustainability Base, is one of the first federal buildings to earn LEED Platinum certification and remains one of the most innovative in the U.S. government’s portfolio.
During design charrettes, Zornetzer says, McDonough’s hands would “literally represent what was going on in his mind” as the architect sketched, never wedded to one concept, edging things out until they felt right. “There was a lot of free thinking,” Zornetzer recalls. “I enjoy Bill. He’s one of the great thinkers in modern architecture and design and sustainability writ large.”
Herbert Perico Crissien, president of the board at Universidad EAN, still has the sketch McDonough texted him at 2:30 a.m. after they met to discuss the school’s new building in Bogota. Set to break ground in January, Project Legacy features a lattice frame with adjustable leaf-like triangles to control temperature and light. Crissien says Colombia’s treasury minister is so impressed with the project that he released public funds for a lower-interest loan that will save the university upward of $8 million.
Early Years
The great epiphany that informed much of McDonough’s life came when he was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, watching a log burn in a fireplace. From his early years in Japan, he had wondered how Hiroshima could have been destroyed in seconds, but relativity theory was a lot to get his mind around. As he watched the log become ash, McDonough thought entropy must have an opposite—a negative entropy. He found it, eventually, in biology.
“Life is basically the aggregation of solar energy combined with carbon from the atmosphere and ice from the atmosphere and so on. So, we’re basically a dead rock in space with water and some sunshine,” he says. “What happens in biology, that is soil. Once soil begins, we begin. The Latin root for soil is hummus, same as the root for human, same as humility, which means you’re grounded. All of a sudden, the soil became sacred to me.”
McDonough switched his major from international relations to the arts and decided that one day he would create “buildings like trees with negative-entropy order, out of random environments that are beneficial to the organism.” He studied with photographer Walker Evans, learned Bauhaus design, and got his master’s in architecture at Yale.
A few decades later, McDonough designed the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio to function like a tree, purifying its wastewater and sewage in a system that produces carbon-rich compost and produces more solar energy than it needs. He envisions cities like forests—healthy, safe, and diverse with clean air, water, soil, and power. For Scot Horst, CEO of technology company Arc Skoru who helped to make C2C part of LEED credits when Horst was chief product officer for the USGBC, the dream is real—and the Oberlin project is proof.
“I remember rolling my eyes, like, ‘Yeah, sure, your building is going to create more energy and clean the water.’ They did it,” Horst says. “Bill is the epitome of how great things happen when you think great things.”