We asked architects to draw up plans for the most energy-efficient houses they could imagine. They imagined quite a bit. What will the energy-efficient house of the future look like? It could have gardens on its walls or a pond stocked with fish for dinner. It might mimic a tree, turning sunlight into energy and carbon dioxide into oxygen. Or perhaps it will be more like a lizard, changing its color to suit the weather and healing itself when it gets damaged. Those are just a handful of the possibilities that emerged from an exercise in futurism. The Wall Street Journal asked four architects to design an energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable house without regard to cost, technology, aesthetics or the way we are used to living. The idea was not to dream up anything impossible or unlikely — in other words, no antigravity living rooms. Instead, we asked the architects to think of what technology might make possible in the next few decades. They in turn asked us to rethink the way we live. ‘This is a time of re-examining values, re-examining what we need,’ says one of our architects, Rick Cook, of the New York firm […]