It would be easy to miss out completely on e-House, architect Michael McDonough's version of the "house of the future," if you didn't know it was there. His "living laboratory," currently under construction in delightfully obscure Vly (near Stone Ridge), is tucked away in the woods, far back from the road, like most other houses in the area. But the similarities between e-House and other country houses end there. E-House is a 2,000-square-foot "smart" home/workspace in the making designed to be Web site-controlled using embedded-chip, energy-consumption monitoring systems. It is completely sustainable, incorporates alternative energy sources, and is being constructed by conventional builders using high-tech products available online. It's no wonder Tom Wolfe characterized McDonough in Art Dogs, a compilation of the work of innovative artists and designers, as one of America's rarely-found "exuberant" designers.

And that's only part of the story. McDonough's project belongs as much to the Ulster County landscape as it does to the future. A passive solar shell clad with native bluestone, using locally milled lumber from the site and a shape designed "in response to nature as generator," encourages what McDonough calls "light-catching" and "view-catching" - e-House is at once beautiful, futuristic, environmentally responsible and historically relevant. McDonough says his main goals in creating e-House are "to make green glamorous," include "everything that I see happening in the future," and to complete the design from the comfort of his own pc using materials that are "readily available on the Internet via e-mail, credit card, and ups or FedEx." He explains: "The two major building blocks that separate where we are now and where we should be in 20 years are sustainable technologies and advanced computing technologies, as in the Internet. I saw those two being absolutely logical partners, technologies that will inevitably work in tandem. I don't think you can have any future without green building, and you can't have green building without computing."

It isn't often that a building project as ambitious and unusual as e-House happens right here in our own backyard, so this past summer I contacted McDonough and arranged to meet him on-site. As luck would have it, Mother Nature chose to grace us with yet another intense rain spell on the day of our appointment. The rain not only had me concerned about what I would actually be able to see of the house, but it created some confusion upon arrival - it was so dark out in the wilds of Vly that I still wasn't sure I was in the right place even after I'd driven the length of McDonough's driveway. But I needn't have worried - the bad weather did not impair my experience of e-House in the least. In fact, I realized in retrospect, the rain created a metaphor for what McDonough is proving - that the seeds of the future may seem hidden but are actually right there in front of us.

Although e-House is set for completion by the end of 2003, the site in June included a trailer-and-tent setup - temporary quarters, McDonough later told me, for him and his wife, food writer Corrine Trang. Beyond the typical rural menage of half-used living quarters, trees, and scrubby patches of rocks, weeds, and wild grasses, e-House stood tall in the center of the clearing, a pale box-pile structure. As if to punctuate my surprise at the scene I'd come upon, out of the trailer sprang McDonough, dressed all in black like a typical New Yorker (which he is, with a thriving architectural practice in SoHo) and hoisting an umbrella. A slight, spry man, he soon proved to have an engaging intellectual intensity. As soon as I'd joined McDonough beneath his umbrella to pick our way through the mud, he began explaining his ideas about e-House, waving his free hand expressively. Inside the house, he never let up, handing me samples and pointing out details in between philosophical musings, meanwhile stepping nimbly over piles of materials and up and down ladders.