Green to the Core

"It is, in many respects, a quintessential Bohemian scene: an artists' studio in a down-at-the-heels precinct, its raw concrete floor cluttered with works in progress, the view from the windows dominated by the grimy apartment blocks and half-abandoned warehouses of Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighbourhood.

But the Monti Building is far from a standard-issue reclaimed warehouse. Over the past two years, the four-storey structure - built in the 1880s to house a brewery - has undergone a $950,000 (U.S.) retrofit, transforming it into possibly New York's greenest loft-style studio complex. Part of its roof has been crowned with a 40-kilowatt array of solar panels and the rest has been carpeted in vegetation. Its new concrete floors, made from the fly-ash waste of coal-fired power plants, are laced with tubes that provide high-efficiency radiant heat for the building's 25 studios.

An unlikely design and general contracting firm called Big Sue - a husband-and-wife team consisting of Benton Brown, 35, and Susan Boyle, 34 - oversaw the renovation. Their previous areas of expertise were avant-garde sculpture and sustainable-transport advocacy, respectively; what they knew of the green-building trade had mostly been learned on the fly, converting the adjacent Ice House building into six hyper-efficient residential units (including their own) in 2004. That building now uses solar power for 30 per cent of its electricity load, while the sun supplies 90 per cent of the Monti's current demand.

The Monti Building offers back-to-the-loft environmentalism - downtown, artistically bent and hyper-modern, in stark contrast to the rural, craft-oriented, modern-primitive aesthetic that defined the green lifestyle for most of the 20th century. Here are inner-city condos in place of high-country yurts, fly-ash concrete and photovoltaics instead of canvas and buckskin.

And here, perhaps most significantly, is a simple realignment of ongoing modes of living rather than an improbable utopian rebirth. It's an approach to sustainable living with far greater potential to reconfigure the way the majority of us think about where and how to live - and about what constitutes the good life."