Sep. 7--Those stately bur oaks have seen a lot of bright ideas. In 1893, they shared the glow when brand-new electric lights illuminated the White City. Now they overlook green roofs, LED lamps, rain barrels and a bioswale.

Beneath their boughs spreads the landscape of a Smart Home, built to demonstrate, inside and out, how new technologies, new ideas and new attitudes can help a family live more gently on the land. And the whole thing is nestled between wings of the Museum of Science and Industry -- the only remaining building from the World's Columbian Exposition, which showed off the big ideas of the 19th Century.

The "Smart Home: Green + Wired" exhibit is a full-size, fully functioning home constructed on the museum's grounds. The building's architect, Californian Michelle Kaufmann, set out to demonstrate ways large and small that a typical family could reduce its environmental impact. The big ideas indoors have to do with modular building; saving energy, often by high-tech automation, monitoring and control (after all, it's co-sponsored by WIRED magazine); living more richly in a smaller space; natural ventilation and cooling; collecting solar energy; re-using, in often elegant ways, materials that once would have gone to landfills, such as old wood, glass and even light bulbs; reducing water use and heat loss; finding sustainable sources; and working recycling and other earth-friendly practices into the regular rhythm of life. The home's many features can be seen up close on daily tours through Jan. 4.

But the outdoors is more than just a frame for the house. It is also full of big ideas.

BIG IDEA: Respect the landscape. Rather than scraping the site bare, Kaufmann and landscape architect Bernard Jacobs of Jacobs/Ryan Associates in Chicago nestled the house under the 150-year-old oak grove in a neglected patch of weedy grass close to where the U-505 submarine once stood. The oaks shade the house to keep it cool and make a leafy bower of a second-floor deck.

BIG IDEA: Save water. This landscape was designed so that once established, the plants should be able to get by on rainfall. Apart from the vegetables, most of the species are native to habitats in this region: dry prairie, wet prairie and oak savanna.

BIG IDEA: Capture each raindrop. The goal, Jacobs says, was to keep all rain on the site and not let any run off into the storm sewers, where storm water adds to the load of wastewater that must be treated and can wash pollutants into waterways and lakes.