I was reading an article today and it made me think differently (I love when that happens) about green building.

We hear often that building green is much more costly than traditional building, the main reason more people don’t do it. Have you ever stopped to really question why? Lloyd Alter wrote an article I found on TreeHugger discussing this very topic.

First, we build homes the traditional way, then we add on energy efficient technology which, of course, adds to the cost of the home. The problem is, we continue to build homes the way we always have then we modify them, alter them, add onto them, all in an attempt to make them efficient. So, we pay to build the house then pay again to in our efforts to make it efficient. As the house gets greener, the cost keeps going up.

We need to expand our thinking. Determine how do we build an efficient house? The traditional way doesn’t do it. We need to rethink and redesign architecture as we’ve known it. Rather than putting on a roof and adding solar panels, how do you redesign roof systems? Look at the tankless water heater. Water heater redesign. No more water!

Rather than building a house then rebuilding it to make it efficient, we have to redesign ground up! What does efficiency look like?