By Richard Manning. As an architect and sustainability consultant, I work on many green building projects. Unfortunately, the fast pace of design and construction projects coupled with work travel doesn’t often give me a chance to visit the finished building.

Let’s face it, I’m a little obsessed. After an only so-so experience living in a prefab house many years ago, I’m now awakening to the wonderful potential of today’s modern prefab home brought to us by such designers as Ray Kappe, Jennifer Siegel, and Charlie Lazor.

A 73-year-old Californian, small and wiry, who is: an active surfer, skateboarder, and runner; who, without formal architectural training, installed a living sod roof on the first house he built back in the 1960s—four decades before living roofs became darling icons of the green movement.

In my opinion, radiant floor heating is one of the most efficient means of heating your home. As is commonly known, heat rises; that said, radiant heating (which operates from the ground up) will heat a home more evenly, efficiently, and cost effectively than other types.

The creation of a home is by no means a simple act. Thousands of decisions will go into that process, based on cultural values that may be stated or unstated. A home that is constructed to be the largest space for the least amount of money will look, feel and act…

Many people are unaware that the blue jeans worn by your favorite celebrities may end up in your walls. No, not as trophies from an auction house, but as insulation to keep out the cold.

We all have something that gets our goat. Something that’s just not right and needs to be fixed. For David Gottfried, owner of the greenest home in America, the property appraisal system is broken and needs overhauling now.

Of all people, we’d expect David Gottfried to max out on alternative energy and water conservation. After all, he founded the U.S. and World Green Building Councils, and his Oakland, California, home recently earned the highest-ever LEED Platinum certification and GreenPoint Rating.

Efficiency. Not a word that usually makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside. Yet David and Sara Gottfried have applied the genius of “and” by making their award-winning home welcoming, comfy, and highly efficient.

In citing the top three factors that drive real estate valuation, the universal drum beat ‘Location, Location, Location’ has been around forever. For sure, location is a big part of the green home, but to create the greenest of homes we need to step it up a level.

David and Sara Gottfried’s Oakland, California home is the ne plus ultra of green by design. Based on its LEED Platinum certification and GreenPoint Rating, the recent restoration of their 1915 Craftsman house has generated the highest green scores of any home in the United States. Their property is off-the-charts green.

When my partner and I designed and built the Nolalu Eco Centre, the largest solar-and-wind-powered straw bale facility in Ontario, we did it to accomplish something positive on behalf of the planet

Unless you’ve been living in a dirt-floored cave for a decade, you already know that bamboo is a great, green alternative to hardwood flooring. Classified as a grass, bamboo can grow as much as 12 inches a day, and after being cut, will renew itself in as short a time as three to five years—much [...]

Charlie Lazor is a polymath. That’s not name calling, but high praise for a man who brings insights from many disciplines to the modern prefab home.

This is a story about disappointment and, yes, envy.  About what happens when green idealism crashes into the limitations of a movement that is still groping its way forward, leaving many people like me perplexed and terrified in equal measure.

Michelle Kaufmann is the real deal. Recent winner of the Social Venture Network’s 2008 Innovation Award, Michelle is known for her prefabricated green home designs that brilliantly balance our need for sustainable design, beauty, and affordability. For Michelle, there’s no need for tradeoffs when operating within the right set of principles.

There we were. Our first winter in our straw bale home, gloating over its super-efficient R46+ insulated walls—that’ll keep those cold Canadian winters out! But winter came, and at night the house cooled off more quickly than we expected. So what gives? Turns out, our windows were the culprits. Pretty quickly we learned that windows [...]

Shopping list: skim milk for my cereal, whole milk for my coffee, chocolate milk for the kids, milk paint for the walls…

The notion of the FlatPak house seems so simple that it strikes me, as first-time observer, with forehead-slapping “what-took-so-long?” wonder.

Bearing a simple cloth sack of Asian pears from his garden, Sim Van der Ryn arrives at my door for lunch today. He gazes around the house and immediately we discover a connection—the designer/builder of my place turns out to have been one of his students, Paul Korhummel.