In Chicago, Tinted Green

CHICAGO

EARTH AND WIND Frances Whitehead and James Elniski’s house was built using a number of green technologies. More Photos »

Solar panels on the roof are tilted to the heavens, and trays of artificial soil are planted with sedum and other plants to soak up rainwater and keep it from flooding the city’s storm drainage system. More Photos >

SEVENTEEN years ago, Frances Whitehead and James Elniski were married inside a florist’s leaky old greenhouse, where the resident parrot seemed to mock their vows with what sounded like sardonic laughter. The location was, in a way, prophetic. The bride and groom couldn’t have known it, but another sort of green house eventually would come to dominate their lives.

In mid-February, Ms. Whitehead, 54, and Mr. Elniski, 56, gave this reporter a tour of their new residence in the West Town neighborhood here, leading the way up a spiral staircase into a modest office. Sliding doors opened onto a wintry rooftop scene, where two silver corkscrews mounted on tall poles twirled lazily in eddies of wind. “I think of them as the new Brancusis,” said Ms. Whitehead, an artist with thick, tousled hair that brings to mind a shorn field in a crazy wind.

Though Ms. Whitehead and Mr. Elniski, who is also an artist, spent ,000 last year to buy and install the wind turbines (wildly expensive retrofits and mishaps included), they estimate that they will probably save only about 0 annually in energy costs, making the payback period 80 years, a point almost certainly beyond the end of their lives. Still, there are other, more critical economies to consider, Ms. Whitehead said, like the carbon economy. “We could have bought two new cars for the same money,” she said, “but we’d rather have these.”

Much as the writer Robert Pirsig divined the tenets of Eastern philosophy in every prosaic bend in the road in his 1974 classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Ms. Whitehead and Mr. Elniski, faculty members at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, have found a conceptual art project in their own effort to live sustainably, in a house that presents itself as so environmentally responsible that even the front facade is clad in emerald green glazed bricks as a visual pun.

“One of the things that artists do is make the invisible visible,” Ms. Whitehead said. “We’re trying to come up with a picture of the future, and we think this is what it will look like. Not stylistically, but in terms of the complex systems that we will all undoubtedly use for the collection of water and the micro-generation of energy.”

Ms. Whitehead and Mr. Elniski shy away from making absolute claims about the comprehensiveness of their house’s energy-saving systems, and declined to say how much they spent. There is always more to be done, they noted, and “between now and Thursday, something new could come out,” Mr. Elniski ventured. But they believe they are living as sustainably as they reasonably can in a world where local commercial availability of such products is limited, and finding technicians to install and maintain systems is a challenge.

“We do not have black floors,” which hold the sun’s warmth better than light-colored floors, Ms. Whitehead said. “We do not have this new thing called Trombe walls, which soak up heat and release it back into a room like solar space heaters. We do not have gray-water recycling. But we’ve done a lot, while always being careful to balance it with an aesthetic atmosphere that people would actually want to live in.”

They see their house as a sculpture, though not in the visual, tactile way that a Frank Gehry building is sculptural. With its corrugated steel-and-zinc siding, its central glassed-in courtyard, its appealingly worn furniture and its spans of books, the house looks like it belongs to well-educated people with an interest in design. If it is art, it’s in the experimental spirit of Marcel Duchamp, who moved everyday objects like a urinal and a bicycle wheel into galleries and dubbed them sculptures.

“We’re like Duchamp in reverse, moving the objects out of the realm of art and back into function,” Ms. Whitehead said. She admitted that adopting expensive green technologies that don’t quite have the bugs worked out of them is “not yet a recognizable genre.”

But neither artist prizes formalism for its own sake. Ms. Whitehead, a self-described botany freak who is fascinated by technology, once made an artwork here, at the Lincoln Park Conservatory Great Garden, that transmitted information about the ecosystems in Lake Michigan by using 50,000 plants to form the colored patterns of pie charts, bar graphs and lake-shaped maps.