Green living: Top 10 sustainable houses

The cost of a house can be counted in dollars, but the construction and running of a house takes a toll on the environment that's harder to measure. Increasing numbers of people are looking to minimize both environmental impact and financial outlay by outfitting their homes with sustainable technology, and the resulting boom in sustainable building is driving new levels of architectural innovation. With this in mind, Gizmag highlights ten remarkable sustainable houses.

True sustainability is made up of many facets, from building materials to the use of renewable energy sources to design that strives for efficiency and harmony with the surrounding environment. We think the following selections meet many of these criteria.

The Waste House is a sustainable construction project installed at the UK's University of Brighton. As its name suggests, the prototype home is built almost exclusively from discarded waste. 

Vietnam's Vo Trong Nghia Architects has been tinkering away at the issue of providing practical, sustainable, and most importantly, cheap, homes. The result is the S House, a US$4,000 dwelling part-built using local, easily-obtained materials, including Palm leaf thatching and bamboo.

San Francisco's Fougeron Architecture recently designed and built a particularly beautiful luxury house that's guaranteed to make the neighbors see green. Located on California's Big Sur coastline, the Fall House sports a copper facade that will weather and patina over time, as it comes into contact with the sea air. The copper is also designed to offer a degree of fire-protection.

The ZEB Pilot House, by international architecture outfit Snøhetta is a remarkable experimental home that makes an even more remarkable claim: thanks to incredible efficiency and ample solar panels, it's said to generate almost three times the amount of electricity it requires – leaving plenty of surplus juice for charging an EV, for example.

Whatever kind of home you live in, the chances are it took longer to build than the Pop-Up House, by French architecture firm Multipod, which was erected by a team of builders in just four days with no more tools than a screwdriver. The firm likens the construction process to building with Lego.

Said to be the first certified Passive House in New York City, Tighthouse represents an impressive energy-efficient renovation of an existing row house that's over a hundred years old.

Like Vo Trong Nghia Architects, Vietnamese firm H&P Architects has also produced a prototype home that will eventually be mass-sold to Vietnamese people on a low income. However, this particular home is also flood-proof. The Blooming Bamboo house is placed on stilts and designed to withstand floods of up to 1.5 m (5ft) in depth, though H&P Architects hopes to increase this to 3 m (10ft).

The Slip House, by Carl Turner Architects, offers a potential template for affordable, sustainable family homes in the UK. Slotted between a row of terraced houses in London, the residence also rests on a brownfield site, formerly used for industrial or commercial purposes. Its unusual form consists of three slipped orthogonal box shapes.

Students from Australia's University of Wollongong took a typical Australian "fibro

house," and retrofitted it with enough sustainable technology to make the notoriously energy-hungry style of home into a net-zero house. The Illawarra Flame house project involved a lengthy renovation process, including transforming a bedroom into a living space, and the installation of prefabricated pods which contain amenities including laundry room and bathroom.

In addition to multiple shapes and sizes P.A.T.H homes can sport an all glass outer shell, a combination of wood and glass shell, or fully-wooden shell. Optional sustainable tech includes a roof-based solar array, roof-based wind turbine, and a rainwater collection and filtration system.