In a pastoral setting, the gorgeous cast-glass facade of Neutelings and Riedijk’s Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision masks an efficient ecological machine. Built to house the Dutch television and radio archives, the center’s galleries and offices are insulated from extreme weather by a facade of double glass panels. The archives themselves are buried in underground vaults — the surrounding earth is used to cool the warren of storage rooms. The building is split into two climatic zones, not just to save energy but to reinforce the experience of two different environments: the dark world of the underground vaults, which the architects dubbed the inferno, and the twinkling, light-filled world above.

Neutelings was quick to note that a building’s efficiency should be measured not just by its mechanical systems but also by how much energy it uses over its lifetime. More energy is expended in a building’s construction than at any other stage, so a structure that lasts 100 years will use far less energy than one that lasts 5, no matter how efficient.

“From this point of view the Pyramids are the most sustainable buildings in history,” he said.

For now, the United States has no federal regulations that would guarantee a minimal level of sustainability in new construction — or spur an ecologically attuned approach to new architecture. The LEED guidelines, which were drawn up by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit group founded in 1993, are a voluntary program that is now more than a decade old. Even when they are adhered to — they’ve been adopted by a number of government agencies, most notably the General Services Administration, which oversees the construction of federal buildings — they still have little effect on the majority of commercial or residential construction. In most cases, the decision to make an efficient building still rests with the client.

What’s more, the guidelines often lead to a constricted idea of what sustainability means. “In Europe the guidelines tend to have to do with broader organizational ideas,” Thom Mayne, the founder of the Los Angeles-based architectural firm Morphosis, told me. “Energy consumption, the organization of the workplace, urbanism — they’re all seen as interlinked. Here, the whole focus is on how to get these points. You just check them off: bike racks, high-efficiency air-conditioning units — it’s very narrow.”

Stefan Behnisch, an architect who has long been considered a leader in sustainable research and has worked in both Europe and the United States, agrees. “The problem is that these ideas become clichés,” he says. “They don’t allow for anything interesting and new. They rule out real invention.”

There are, nonetheless, some significant, innovative projects in the United Sates. Norman Foster’s new Hearst Tower in Manhattan has many of the sustainable features he began exploring in the Commerzbank in Frankfurt, like natural ventilation and high-performance glass that deflects heat. And the San Francisco Federal Building, completed this year by Morphosis, looks as if it could have been assembled in Germany: the building’s narrow width gives everyone access to natural light and ventilation, operable windows let in fresh air, elaborate shading devices filter sunlight. “In San Francisco,” Mayne told me, “we didn’t even bother to go after the LEED ranking because it doesn’t necessarily lead to the most efficient building.”

But architects who choose to be inventive often find that the slightest deviation from the norm is fiercely resisted. Mayne relates how some federal workers at his San Francisco building mocked the idea of office-building windows that could be opened and closed, arguing that birds would nest on their desks while they were away over the weekend. Bloggers, meanwhile, claimed that some government bureaucrats had to wear sunglasses indoors because of the amount of natural light. Mayne countered that the shades have yet to be installed. To be sure, it is not just Americans who resist seeing a building as an integral part of the environment. Sauerbruch and his partner, Louisa Hutton, told me that workers at the environment agency in Dessau — long in the habit of toiling in sealed, air-conditioned buildings — often forget to close their windows when they leave the office. Apparently, many of them still find the effort a nuisance.