The Living Building Challenge certification system, developed by the International Living Future Institute in Seattle, requires features like net-zero water usage, meaning that the building must produce all the water it uses (through rainwater collection, for instance). While LEED certifies the design of green buildings, the Living Building Challenge scrutinizes how buildings actually perform, gauging their effect on the environment and measuring their performance a year after construction. In New York City, the Living Building Challenge is a true test, because net-zero water usage is next to impossible to achieve in buildings connected to water and sewer lines — and connection is required by city building codes.

But because the Living Building Challenge is as much a learning process as it is a certification system, as long as builders make an effort to try to change outdated government regulations, their buildings can still meet certification requirements, said Amanda Sturgeon, a vice president of the Living Building Challenge.

Mr. B’Hahn said he was prepared to push for regulatory change. “The sort of people who are going to have the money to buy a place like this are going to be looking for style, comfort and top-quality materials,” he said. “I intend to demonstrate that you don’t have to compromise at all on those qualities when designing some place that’s sustainable.”

The Living Building Challenge emphasizes beauty, spirit and inspiration as much as it does quantifiable results, but another exacting standard, called “passive house,” focuses solely on energy use — the building’s most significant environmental impact. Buildings consume about 40 percent of the world’s primary energy and are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the Rockefeller Institute and DB Climate Change Advisors.

Those percentages are closer to 75 percent in New York City, said Ken Levenson, the president of NY Passive House, a group that promotes passive housing.

Passive, or “zero energy,” houses maintain a comfortable interior climate without active heating and cooling systems. They use super-insulated building envelopes, energy recovery ventilators that exchange interior and exterior air and energy-saving appliances. A passive house uses less than a quarter of the energy of a traditionally powered home, according to the Passivhaus Institut, which developed the standard in Darmstadt, Germany.

Germany has thousands of passive houses, while New York City has about a dozen finished or in the works. Constructing a passive house in the United States can add as much as 6 percent to the total cost, but that number is coming down as more passive-housing products are being imported, Mr. Levenson said. For instance, the cost of the triple-pane windows used in passive housing has fallen by as much as 30 percent in the last two years, he said.