Here’s an excerpt–
In the fall of 2008, Steve Zornetzer, the associate center director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, found himself in Houston with a problem. Ames was three months in on its plans for a new office building, and Zornetzer had just scrapped the entire design. “It was a building that could have been built in 1990,” he says. “There was nothing interesting architecturally or conservationally—it was a very boring project.”
Zornetzer was at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to hear a talk by the San Francisco–based architect and Cradle to Cradle pioneer William McDonough, FAIA, principal of William McDonough + Partners. The leadership at NASA had been interested in McDonough’s knowledge of healthy building materials for possible use in a Mars mission, but McDonough had other ideas. “I asked NASA, ‘Would you mind if we work on coming back to Earth first, before we go to Mars? What if I design a space station on Earth?’ ” McDonough recalls.
Read the full article here
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William McDonough + Partners is the architecture practice founded by William McDonough; he is also active with Cradle to Cradle consulting through MBDC and provides CEO and governmental advising through McDonough Advisors.