sustainable style foundation*

"Most middle-class suburban Americans today live in houses that are more or less of the same basic style as mine: what the real estate agents call 'colonial,' which means pitched roofs, symmetrical windows, brick or clapboard walls, wooden porches," notes author Adam Goodheart. He concludes that, "Green architecture, then, lets us have our cake and eat it too. It lets us combine the extravagant rationalism of Jefferson, whose mansion literally bankrupted him, with the crunchy romanticism of Henry David Thoreau, whose little hut at Walden cost him exactly $28.12 1/2. (The prissiness of that extra half-cent is what forever confirms my own sympathies as more Jeffersonian than Thoreauvian.) The idea of the 'organic' as a cultural touchstone did not spring to life fully formed in the produce aisle of Whole Foods; a century ago, that word was a mantra for architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright."