Interesting piece, but most of this can be generalized in two ways: beyond buildings to the ecological and energy efficiency of other things, and to other build

Interesting piece, but most of this can be generalized in two ways: beyond buildings to the ecological and energy efficiency of other things, and to other buildings beyond energy efficiency. This model-reality gap in discussing energy and resource efficiency has long been an issue with all sorts of things, from toilets to materials to washing machines and so forth. There's some prototypical lab schema that's used to evaluate efficiency (in energy or other resources) that fails to take into account real-world conditions, and once it's put in those real-world conditions the efficiency breaks down. We live in what might be considered a green home in some ways, and try to be sustainable, but I do think there's lots of limits to the scenarios that are used to develop them. I suppose in a general sense this can be extended even further as one example of model-reality discrepancy with all sorts of things we use. The other thing this article maybe misses is that even in buildings that aren't trying to be green, or are, but with reference to non-green elements. I've gone into new buildings of different types, and when there's elements of the building that are relatively specific to that building (i.e., the design of the building is unique), there's all sorts of problems that arise due to discrepancies between what the designers had in mind and reality. One building I'm familiar with had certain design elements for aesthetic and practical reasons, but ended up creating huge sound problems; another one was done for aesthetic and other reasons but had a problem that was obvious in hindsight, but led to critical facilities being unused because people shunned it until it was rectified. This isn't necessarily a criticism of the article but I think it's important to keep in mind a lot of these arguments aren't unique to "green" goals or buildings per se.