William D. Browning
is one of the world's leading practitioners and spokespersons for sustainable building design and real estate development. His career has taken sustainability in the built environment from being an abstract idea to being a solid aesthetic, technical, and economic consideration. Bill had key roles in creating both the U.S. Green Building Council and its LEED™ rating system, and is active on the USGBC Board and LEED committees. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Rocky Mountain Institute, a partner in a new green development consulting firm, Browning + Bannon LLC, and a principal in Haymount, an extraordinary green new-town development in Virginia . In 1991, Bill created Green Development Services (GDS), a group within RMI whose purpose is to help to define and promote energy-efficient and environmentally responsive design.
GDS's services are based largely on new thinking about basic real-estate principles that Bill developed while pursuing his master's degree in real estate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While earning his bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado , Bill specialized in energy-conscious architecture and resource management. Bill led the greening of the White House, and has consulted on more than 300 green development projects worldwide. Representative projects include Four Times Square, Wal-Mart, the Pentagon, Monsanto, Lucasfilm, Habitat for Humanity International, U.S. Naval Facilities Command, a speculative office prototype for Hines, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Bill lectures extensively throughout the world. His books include A Primer on Sustainable Building, and the groundbreaking text Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate. He co-authored the influential Greening the Building and the Bottom Line: Increasing Productivity through Energy-Efficient Design, which presented a new economic case for green design in the workplace based on higher worker productivity, lower absenteeism, fewer errors, better quality, and increased sales.
Bill's work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and on broadcasts by NPR, CNN, and PBS. He advises the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment, and The Trust for Public Land . He serves on the Board of Greening America, has served as national real estate advisor for The Nature Conservancy, and is on the Interface Eco-Dream Team. Among his numerous honors, he was MIT's Public-Sector Fellow at the Center for Real Estate in 1991, he received MIT's Charles H. Spaulding Award in 1995, Honorary AIA membership in 2001, and the USGBC Leadership Award in 2004.
