Energy efficient architecture made with local materials has always been around since the beginning of construction.  Civilizations have always designed and built in response to their environment to make their daily lives more comfortable. Before the 1900’s, when alternating current became wide spread, all buildings were ‘off the electric grid’ and without air-conditioning.  So, before the 1900’s most buildings would have been considered ‘Green Buildings’, ‘Sustainable’, or ‘Carbon Neutral’ by today’s buzzword standards.  Things went awry in the United States when buildings designed for natural ventilation were retrofitted with central air-conditioning.  The buildings envelopes could not contain the conditioned air and became ‘energy hogs’.  The design response in the 60’s – 80’s was to tighten and insulate the new building envelope to create an engineered sealed box and ignore the natural environment.  While maintaining the interior temperature comfort of the occupants this design approach created the new problem of building related illness.  The EPA defines Sick Building Syndrome as “Term that refers to a set of symptoms that affect some number of building occupants during the time they spend in the building and diminish or go away during periods when they leave the building.”  In the 1990’s extensive studies were conducted on indoor air quality and modern construction’s impact on the environment.  Multiple design performance standards and guidelines were created by various government agencies, trade associations, and non-profit agencies.  In 1994 the Green Building Council began to develop the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system to provide an organized way to determine which standards should be used with various building types and also assigned a point rating system to the various standards to evaluate their impact on the environment.  The expensive new green building technology grabs the news, however just about any well designed building can meet the basic LEED certification without exotic technology.  Also, a misunderstanding about green building is that buildings cannot be designed to be more energy efficient and environmentally friendly without the additional cost of being submitted for LEED certification.  Most of our clients are not concerned with the marketing potential of LEED certification of their buildings, but are interested in inexpensively cutting their long-term energy and maintenance cost with proper building design.  Finally an additional misunderstanding is an energy efficient building has to look like something from the future.  As mentioned earlier prior to the 1960’s buildings responded to their environmental context to keep their occupants comfortable in an energy efficient manner.