Acqua Liana, a green (LEED certified) luxury mansion designed by Frank McKinney. Price tag: $29 million.

Typically, the bigger a home gets, the more stress it puts on our environment. With increasing size comes increasing energy expenditure, increasing natural resource consumption, increasing land use, increasing waste, etc. Unfortunately, it’s just an inherent result of building big.

With Acqua Liana, however, real estate designer/developer Frank McKinney is challenging this notion. Acqua Liana (here are some good pictures from the Wall Street Journal), or “Water Flower” in Tahitian and Fijian, is an incredible 15,071 square foot mansion that sits on 1.6 acres of oceanfront property near Palm Beach in Manalapan, Florida. Along with its seven bedrooms and eleven bathrooms, the residence has a seemingly endless list of luxurious features, including a glass “water floor” with a Lotus garden motif illuminated below, 2,000 gallon aquarium bar, double helix glass staircase, fitness studio, glass office, two glass elevators, glass wine cellar, movie theater, oversize garage with windows to the pool above, swimmable water gardens, lounge and lap pool, reflecting pools, waterfall spa with fireplace, floating sun terrace, water palapa, two-bedroom two-bath guesthouse partially submerged in a lagoon, yacht dockage… And the list goes on, trust me…

Acqua Liana's spiral staircase and glass "water floor".

Despite all this opulence, one of the Acqua Liana’s greatest qualities is the fact that it is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. It utilizes solar panel arrays that generate enough energy to run two average-sized homes, energy-efficient appliances and air-conditioning, insulating materials and design, environmentally-conscious lighting that reduces energy needs by 70%, and a roof design that collects enough runoff water to fill an average swimming pool every 14 days. The property, so they claim, has enough pools, reflecting ponds, water gardens, misters, and waterfalls to drop the site temperature by 2-3 degrees, thus reducing cooling demands. Just so you know it’s all working, there is also an “automated bio-feedback system will display its energy efficiency in real time” (I’d be lying if I told you I know exactly what that means).

That’s not all. The home is constructed of enough reclaimed and renewable wood to save over 10.5 acres of rain forest. During construction, over 340,000 pounds of debris and trash was recycled, and over 85% of all debris was diverted and will never reach a landfill. Yes, believe it or not, this is a truly green home.

If you can look past the unintentionally amusing absurdity of McKinney’s over-embellished bio, and the Fabio meets rockstar meets David Blaine persona, you’d have to admit that Acqua Liana is absolutely freaking awesome. Its price tag, though, is equally as extravagant, a cool $29 million, so start saving.

Sure, Acqua Liana is completely over the top and financially impractical, and it’s not going to be the type of building that’s going to establish green development as the functionally, as well as economically, superior alternative to traditional development. However, it’s beautiful, at the cutting edge of green technology, and ridiculously cool, and it’s also getting loads of media attention, from real estate ads, to green building publications, to blogs (even from WSJ), etc. So, although it won’t be bringing economical green housing options to the masses or proving to skeptics that green is the way to go, maybe it’ll bring attention to the concept, bring it even farther into the mainstream. Let’s hope so.

In the meantime, if anyone is feeling particularly charitable, I’m trying to save up a few bucks…around 29 million…

Grow .2, a form of solar ivy, is depicted covering the side of a house.

It’s pretty much exactly what you think: solar-powered “ivy”. SMIT (be sure to check out the pictures under the “Grow .1″ and “Grow .2″ links at the top of the page), a Brooklyn-based start-up company, has been developing an alternative energy system that resembles ivy crawling up the side of a building.

There are two versions of the system, Grow .1 and Grow .2. Grow .2 is the simpler version, which basically substitutes traditional fixed solar panels with a flexible covering of small, thin, flexible solar “leaves” that can adapt to most buildings. The modular nature of the solar panels makes replacing, repairing, and upgrading the lattice cheaper and easier.

Grow .1 is where things start to get really cool. Grow .1, which looks even more like ivy than Grow .2, is a hybrid energy source, harnessing both solar power and wind to produce energy. This system, which also utilizes a modular format, is made up of “bricks”, each of which hold five solar leaves. Embedded within each leaf are thin film photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into energy. In addition, as each leaf twists and bends in the wind, tiny piezoelectric generators in the flexible “stems” of the leaves convert the movement into more energy. Not only that, but the system also uses reclaimed and recycled material whenever possible to minimize its ecological footprint. Pretty awesome.

Grow .1, a hybrid energy-delivery system that harnesses both wind and solar power.

Although the company name could use some work, SMIT is apparently getting someone’s attention, as is evidenced by the fact that they have been invited to include Grow .1 in the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (to go to the broader exhibit site, click here – it’s pretty overwhelming, but fascinating).

I don’t know how well the devices actually work, or whether they’ll be revolutionary or not, but, either way, it’s all pretty damn cool. Don’t you think?