Green Builders of America

Green Builders of America is presented as a sponsor and advocate for a forward-looking architectural conversation, most clearly through its competition marking the twentieth anniversary of Bernadette Fox’s Twenty Mile House. The house had been demolished, and its plans and photographs were scarce; the organization’s response was not simply to commemorate a lost building but to invite new designs that tested what building green might mean in the next twenty years.

Identity and Public Role

The book gives Green Builders of America a specific, documented role rather than a broad institutional portrait: it sponsors an architectural competition in conjunction with the Turner Foundation. The announcement invites architects, students, and builders to submit designs, placing the organization at the meeting point of professional practice, education, and public debate. Its stated purpose is to use the rebuilding challenge to open a dialogue about the future meaning of green building.

That purpose matters because the competition treats sustainability as a design constraint and a question for continued debate, not as a label already settled. The announcement calls for a single-family residence with three bedrooms and 4,200 square feet, while carrying forward the defining restriction Fox placed on herself: every material must come from within twenty miles of the building site. Green Builders of America thus presents the house’s material rule as the starting point for new work, while asking participants to reconsider its relevance twenty years on.

The Twenty Mile House Competition

The competition is titled “20 × 20 × 20: The Twenty Mile House,” with its framing divided between the house twenty years after its creation and the possibilities twenty years into the future. Entrants are asked to envision rebuilding at 6528 Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. The brief’s unusually precise scale, site, and sourcing condition make the original house more than a loose inspiration: they give contestants a shared architectural problem to answer.

The announcement identifies a striking tension at the heart of that problem. Fox’s house no longer stands; few photographs survive, and she is said to have destroyed all the plans. Yet the announcement says its relevance grows with each passing year. By making reconstruction the subject of a competition despite the thin surviving record, Green Builders of America turns absence into a prompt for design and discussion. The invited work is not a literal recovery of a complete archive, but a renewed engagement with the house’s principles.

The submission deadline is February 1. The winning design is to be announced at a gala associated with the Green Builders of America and the American Institute of Architects at Getty Center grounds, and the winner is to receive $40,000. Those details give the competition a public culmination: the designs are solicited from a broad group of practitioners and students, then a selected proposal is recognized at a professional gathering.

The House Behind the Brief

The significance of the challenge is sharpened by accounts of what Fox built. Paul Jellinek recalls that in 1992, when green architecture was being discussed but beauty was not yet a priority in environmental design, visitors expected something crude and improvised. Instead, they entered a glass box with clean lines, concrete floors, wood walls and ceilings, and exposed-aggregate counters containing pieces of broken glass for translucent color. The interior, despite its warm materials, felt lighter than the outside. This account gives the competition’s reference point an architectural specificity: the house’s environmental principle coexisted with a carefully described visual effect.

Jellinek also recalls Fox building the garage with concrete forms and tilt-up walls while visitors affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation rolled up their sleeves and helped. That episode belongs to the house’s history, not to Green Builders of America’s documented activities, but it helps explain why a later competition could treat the building as a consequential design rather than merely a vanished residence. The competition’s brief carries forward the local-material restriction while inviting a new generation to decide how that principle might be expressed.

Loss, Memory, and Significance

The house’s destruction gives the anniversary initiative its central complication. Three years of construction were undone in a day by bulldozers; the only surviving photographs are those realtor Judy Toll took with a point-and-shoot camera, and the only plans are Fox’s comically incomplete submissions to the building department. News of the demolition prompted grief in architecture circles. This loss means the contest cannot rely on a complete set of drawings or a richly documented photographic record as the basis for reconstruction.

Green Builders of America’s announcement responds to that fragile record by turning remembrance outward. Rather than presenting the demolished house as a finished chapter, it asks entrants to rebuild its idea and to use that act to examine the next twenty years of green building. Its role in the novel is therefore both practical and interpretive: it supplies a concrete brief, a deadline, a prize, and a venue for recognition, while helping show how an architectural work can remain influential after its physical materials have been destroyed. The contest makes the house’s defining restriction portable, even as the lost original itself cannot be recovered from the scant evidence that remains.