A Brief History of Green Building Advisor – GreenBuildingAdvisor

By Martin Holladay | August 1, 2025

When I began working as a builder in 1974, finding answers to construction questions wasn’t easy. Neither the Journal of Light Construction nor Fine Homebuilding existed yet. One of the few encyclopedic resources we had was the Whole Earth Catalog, which (to the best of my recollection) recommended a textbook called Modern Carpentry by Willis Wagner and the Reader’s Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual. In the pre-internet days, that was about it.

These days, every young builder has a phone in his or her pocket, with instant access to YouTube videos on any imaginable topic, as well as easy access to Green Building Advisor. Times have changed.

In the fall of 2008, when I was working as the editor of Energy Design Update, I got a call from Alex Wilson, the founder of BuildingGreen, which at that time was the web’s leading green website. Wilson invited me to apply for a job with his company. A short time later, I was hired as a senior editor at a soon-to-be-launched website called Green Building Advisor.

Early resources for green builders

Back in 2008, green building seemed to be a topic of growing interest.

One of the earliest available information resources for American green builders was a website and newsletter called Environmental Building News (EBN), which was founded in 1992 by Alex Wilson and Nadav Malin of BuildingGreen. In its early years, EBN aimed to provide resources for both commercial and residential projects; that said, the newsletter’s editors were aware that most of their subscribers were focused on commercial construction.

“BuildingGreen had a website that tried to serve both the residential and commercial sides of the green building field, without really succeeding,” Wilson recalled in a recent conversation. “We were doing a good job serving the commercial construction market, but we were leaving…