Why so green? To many of us sustainability is considered a major cut in our luxurious life while to others it is a future with clean energy and a healthy life.  Going 'green' not only helps preserve our resources for the future but it also makes the world a cleaner and vital place.  Our project is a furtherance study of 'Passive Houses' which began in a summer in Europe, 2010 as part of a CUNY research grant which included on-site observations and documentation of passive design.  The impression: Europe is decades ahead of us; our recommendation: let’s catch up, at least!  Our project is comprised of two parts: Research and Application.  Research involved poring over a vast amount of books, professional journals, newspaper articles, the internet, and an abundance of material and photos gathered in Europe.  We became familiarized with key topics, terms and systems, working hard to take away just what we needed to know in order to move our project forward.  After plunging through our resources, we propose a simple and economical single family house on a vacant site in Staten Island, NY with continental climatic conditions and easy access to public transportation.  We focused on fundamental concepts of the passive house such as site orientation, protective vegetation, super insulation and healthful ventilation.  Our intention is to mainly provide ordinary people with an adequate home for them to grow and blossom for generations.  Our design can be fabricated in a factory, delivered and assembled on the site with very short amount of time.  We relied heavily on local materials, which are not only economical but also sustainable and good for the environment.  Renewable energy sources such as geothermal, solar and photovoltaic, wind and bio-mass were explored, as well as “green” and sustainability considerations of eco-friendly products which do not harm the environment.  The passive house concept not only saves home owners energy dollars, but produces a comfortable and sustainable building, one which ultimately benefits the environment at large by not contributing to global warming.  Our next step is to bring this effort further, to go beyond the conceptual realm and to make a real difference in the real built world!