Since becoming in 1996 the first and only individual to receive the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the nation’s highest environmental honor, McDonough earned the US EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award as a member of the EcoWorx™ development team for Shaw Industries. Most recently, he received the National Design Award for exemplary achievement in the field of environmental design. Presented annually by the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, it is an award recognizing “excellence, innovation and lasting achievement.”

McDonough is principal of MBDC, a product and systems development firm assisting prominent client companies in designing profitable and environmentally intelligent solutions. He is also the founding principal of William McDonough +Partners, Architecture and Community Design, an internationally recognized design firm practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent architecture and planning in the US and abroad. 

McDonough is an Alumni Research Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, and Consulting Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He also serves as US Chairman and member of the Board of Councilors of the China-US Center for Sustainable Development, and Chairman of the Board of Overseers for the Center for Eco-Intelligent Management at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid.  He recently joined the Board of the H. John Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment and the Management Committee of HRH The Prince of Wales’s Business & The Environment Programme at Cambridge University.

From 1994-1999, McDonough was the Edward E. Elson Professor of Architecture and Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia.  MBDC assists clients in profitably implementing its scientifically based design approach to create solutions that are prosperous economically, socially, and environmentally. Recent MBDC projects include designing materials for shoes with Nike, fibers with Honeywell, furniture with Herman Miller, fabrics with Steel case, carpet with Shaw Industries, and transportation-related products with Ford Motor Company. 

William McDonough + Partners has been a leader in the sustainable development movement since 1977. The design of the Environmental Defense Fund offices, completed in 1985, helped launch the ‘green building’ movement. Recent award-winning projects for Gap Inc., Nike, Herman Miller, and Oberlin College have set new standards for design quality, environmental sensitivity, and functional effectiveness. WM+P won BusinessWeek/Architectural Record “Good Design is Good Business” Awards for large commercial projects during both of the awards program’s first two years.

McDonough’s leadership in sustainable development is recognized widely, both in the US and internationally, and he has written and lectured extensively on his design philosophy and practice. He was commissioned in 1991 to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability as guidelines for the City of Hannover’s EXPO 2000, and in 1993 to give the Centennial Sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. More recently, McDonough and Michael Braungart co-authored Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, published in 2002 and now translated in four languages. The two were also the subject of a 2001 documentary video, The Next Industrial Revolution, from Earthome Productions. Read Less ^