SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – "Design a building that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for thousands of species, accrues solar energy as fuel, builds soil, creates microclimate, changes with the seasons, and is beautiful. Imagine a building like a tree." This is the type of environmentally friendly design challenge award-winning architect William McDonough sets for himself and his renowned design firm, William McDonough + Partners. A leader in sustainable development, McDonough will speak on "Ecological Architecture, Design, and Ethics" Wednesday, December 5 at 7:30 PM in Gamble Auditorium of the art museum. This event is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible. McDonough's talk is part of Building Meaning: Architecture and Public Space in the Third Millennium, a yearlong series sponsored by the College's Weissman Center for Leadership. This event is cosponsored by Mount Holyoke's Center for Environmental Literacy.

McDonough's practice of "environmentally intelligent" architecture has garnered numerous awards, including a 2001 I.D. Forty Design Award from I.D. magazine. In 1996, he was the first recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the country's highest environmental award, and in 1999 was named "Designer of the Year" by Interiors magazine. In the same year, Time magazine called him a "Hero for the Planet," saying, "his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world."

McDonough's firm has been hired to redesign Ford Motor Co.'s aging River Rouge plant. "If we do this right, we really will be doing nothing less than transforming the icon of 20th-century manufacturing into the icon of 21st-century sustainable manufacturing," said Ford CEO and chairman William Clay Ford Jr.

Mount Holyoke is in the forefront of the "green" building revolution as well. A multistory, 40,0000 square-foot environmentally sound building now under construction will create a unified science center from four existing buildings. Similarly, plans to expand and renovate the Blanchard Campus Center follow the "green" theme.

McDonough earned a bachelor of arts degree from Dartmouth College and a master's degree from the Yale University School of Architecture in 1976. He holds professorships at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration and at Cornell University.

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