Buy Green

Rizzoli’s Green Living is packaged rather oddly. The cover shows exactly the kind of high-tech modernist “green” architecture that the publisher thinks the public expects, whereas the content of the book offers a compelling, systematic repudiation of that approach and a seductively wide range of traditional alternatives that anyone can love. Don’t judge this book by its cover, in other words. Scholar and architect Barbara Kenda assembled the authors for the project, and Victor Deupi, Norman Crowe, and myself, once her colleagues, owe her much for creatively fusing her own research into healthy living and buildings during the Renaissance with solutions to the modern crisis of construction. This is an important, elegant book that the publisher seems not to have a clue how to market, and it deserves to reach every architect, builder, and concerned citizen’s shelf.