One is designing an environmentally-friendly mess hall and dormitories for a downstate retreat center for Quakers. Another designed the Chicago Center for Green Technology's research library and training center. Another helps find new uses for railroad roundhouses. A fourth local architect, who is serving as an observer at the global warming talks in Copenhagen, has been working to introduce “smart” environmentalism to Oak Park officials -- and anyone else who will listen.

Just because you have a “green” roof or drive a hybrid car doesn't mean you can rest on your laurels, said Mike Iverson, noting that ethanol fuels recommended for many such vehicles “is a terrible strategy because there's not enough land to grow enough corn to meet the demand.” And ethanol production can emit more greenhouse gases than conventional fuels, he added.

Iverson said he makes no specific recommendations, but prefers to lay out the information and let individuals and communities make choices based on the data.

Even Oak Park, with its environmentally-friendly reputation, still has quite a way to go with 60 percent of its housing built before 1929 -- well before the emphasis on making buildings more energy-efficient, he said.

In the end, it's an eye on the bottom line that is making clients more environmentally conscious, said Iverson, who after 25 years as an architect has turned to teaching and pursuing a Ph.D.

“I think architects have no power, no authority to effect change on their own. And planners don't have much authority, either. They follow instructions from their clients.”

A “natural” for recycling has been the often-abandoned railroad roundhouses from Baltimore to British Columbia, which Darrell Babuk says have been turned into everything from restaurants to railroad history museums.

One is being used as a lumber yard, another as a turkey farm, and another in Big Valley, Alberta, Canada, which was stripped of its metal-beamed ceiling during the World War II recycling effort, is preserved as a ruin, Babuk said.

One client who was on board with “green” thinking more than a century before it became a trendy buzz word was the Illinois Quaker Church, which hired Chris Goodie to design a dining hall and two dormitories to go with an already-existing meeting house on a six-and-a-half-acre site in downstate McNabb, Il.

According to Goodie, the campus is designed for a combination of “business, worship, workshops and lectures -- kind of like a chautauqua -- in buildings that are "very tight, well-insulated envelopes ... generous with porches ... with acoustic measures supporting conversation during dining, listening during meetings and worship, and quiet for sleeping.”

The buildings, which have yet to be built because of fund-raising problems caused by the recession, are designed to be in keeping with Quaker founder George Fox's 17th century admonition to “walk lightly on the earth,” Goodie said.

Recycled materials will be used for the Quaker campus whenever possible, as they were used for the Chicago Center for Green Technology's research library and training center designed by another local architect, Thomas Kapusta, who used recycled glass, carpets and rubber, as well as cork, linoleum, bamboo, and even tree branches collected after being knocked down during heavy storms.

Noting that “part of the job was to figure out ways to reuse the debris” from the gut rehab when the building's second floor was cleared for the new facility, Kapusta said 95 percent of that waste was recycled in keeping with the center management's wishes to make the place "a living museum of a LEED (Leadership, Energy, and Environmental Design) project certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Kapusta, who said he started his firm, TKA + Partners especially to do environmentally-sensitive projects, said clients still want to see “some cost justification” for going green, which means “some ideas don't make it to the drawing board, but some do.”

Enough so he no longer considers environmentally-friendly design to be the wave of the future.

“I think it's already here,” Kapusta said.