On Mother Nature Network‘s list of “10 great green houses,” this marvelous PB Elemental house, PC1 Residence, is placed at 10.
But this placement is wrong. A quick comparison of PC1 Residence with the other houses on the list reveals why it should be placed at number one. The reason can be seen immediately in this one example, the Maryfield Home, which is placed at 9 on the list: 
Clearly, MNN only judges greenness in terms of materials:
[R]ecycled framing, low-VOC paints, concrete radiant floors, EnergyStar dimmable CFLs, Solatubes, and a high-efficiency boiler…
If this were not the case, if the organization had other standards for judging greenness, then it would not place Maryfield Home above PC1 Residence. The first, as we can see, is in the middle of nowhere; the second is in a big city. The first has no neighbors, the second is surrounded by neighbors (as Dr. Golob has pointed out, “living with your only neighbor being the wind is a complete disaster in the terms of energy efficiency”). The first house requires a car for mobility; the second, which is on the densely populated Queen Anne Hill, does not need a car—it has access to the metro network—and is in walking distance to shops and restaurants. The other houses on MNN’s list are also isolated—they are in the woods or city limits or some low density location. MNN has confused living in nature with being green.
Great post. The #1 house they list is a farmhouse for raising livestock in rural Wisconsin! It would be more green to live in a sprawling McMansion in Woodinville made out of 0% green materials.
Here’s a direct link to the article:
http://www.mnn.com/the-home/photos/10-gr…
I love magazine articles that focus on multi-million dollar homes that advertise themselves as being green. Normal people like myself look at them and say, “Yeah, wow, I can be green if I only had a few million dollars handy.”
The most green buildings are apartments that don’t have parking. What many regular people live in. Lots of older buildings all over Capitol Hill are like this.
Not these mansions. They are not green.
That Queen Anne one also required tearing down an entire older house and throwing away massive amounts of wood, concrete, sheetrock, etc.
@2 precisely…
to me “green” must incorporate a high degree of simplicity and frugality (of scale, of materials) as well as the particular materials and methods that are identified as being green. Most green projects I have seen require a lot of green and are thus unattainable by all but a few percent of the people living on the planet
RE PC: “That Queen Anne one also required tearing down an entire older house and throwing away massive amounts of wood, concrete, sheetrock, etc.”
To be fair, though, that house was rotting–and the owner of PC1 used salvaged bamboo to build his fence. Also, there is an ADU, so it’s a 2-family home. I have the hots for PC1.
The greenest house is a condo apartment inside an energy efficient building where people don’t take up much space and get most of their heat and electricity from hydroelectricity.
Which means anyone in an apartment building gets a 95 while people in the most efficient single bedroom house get at best a 45.
Just do the math – most impact of global warming is from heating and cooling buildings, and second most from vehicles.
Anyone living in a “green” mansion is … not green.
This is a joke. For starters, any house over 2,000 square feet isn’t very “green”. Some of these look to be three times that. And building a house in the middle of the woods, no matter how carefully you work around the trees, isn’t green. As pointed out above, there are several million people in New York who are greener than any house on this list.
But then, “green” is really just another vanity tag for the Architectural Digest set. Ultimately, these houses are about the ability to afford large plots of land away from other people.
The greenest home is a Section #8 apartment.
Small, low energy usage and typically with a large family in it utilizing less energy per person than all the Gargantuan eco-phoney homes.
Here’s my nomination for greenest house–hell, the whole neighborhood is green:
http://pixdaus.com/pics/dw7DI7DHzETX.jpg
(Bonus points for Mudede interest!)
Goddamn broken link. Allow me to repost:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rodbev/3356…
Agreed, Mudede. Nice post. It’s a shame when even a “green” blog gets it wrong.
Well, close @8 – the greenest is a section 8 apartment occupied by bus-using vegetarians who use recycled clothing and have no kids.
Nice post. Great line: MNN has confused living in nature with being green.
One of the paradoxes of our post-natural human existence is that, the closer we want to be to nature, the easier it is to do harm to nature.
And I’ll chime in with most of the commenters here. There’s no such thing as a green mansion, no matter how dense the neighborhood or what materials it’s made from or how it gets its energy. Calling a mansion green is about as vacuous as putting Brad Pitt on a list of America’s greenest celebrities. There’s a certain point, a limit, at which you simply can’t have your cake and eat it too.
The fact that sites like the one mentioned are bandying about the word “green” in this context just shows how the word in this use has been stripped of all meaning.
Magazines exist to sell advertisements. Section 8 apartment buildings don’t purchase ad space, but building materials manufacturers do. So-called “green” magazines are therefore compelled to try to convince you to rip out your perfectly serviceable hardwood flooring and replace it with “greener” bamboo flooring imported from China. Perhaps it would be a better green investment to replace your furnace with a more energy-efficient model, but furnaces don’t sell magazines because they’re not as sexy as those organic cotton bedsheets or reclaimed marble dog bowls or whatever.