Three projects in the studio are being run against a standard that asks a great deal more of a building than any code does: to make more energy over a year than it uses, to collect and treat its own water on the site it stands on, and to avoid a long list of ordinary materials outright rather than by exception.

Most of the work is unglamorous. It is substitution, testing, and saying no to products that would otherwise be specified without a second thought, and then writing down why. We publish the progress here, including the parts that slip.