This is one in a series about living green. Next week, we explore contemporary green homes.

Forty years ago, Gwladys and Eugene Scott combined their lives and families and set out to design their dream house: a Japanese-inspired home in a South Florida hammock. It was to be without air conditioning, using salvaged pine beams, and open to the trees.

In 1961, tomato farmers Don and Joyce Gann engaged architect Alfred Browning Parker to design a home in their Goulds hammock. Because Don had sinus problems in air conditioning, the house was intended to be livable year-round without mechanical cooling or heating. Parker called it the last of his ``little houses.''

Designs from 50 years ago, such as those used by the Scotts and the Ganns, which opened homes to nature, are being reexamined today as models for green living.

Passive design for cooling was the norm for early and even mid-20th century Florida. Architects working after World War II and into the 1950s and '60s worked with a wide range of these design tools, such as building orientation, wide overhangs, strategically placed windows, clerestories and transoms.

Energy-efficient appliances, low-flow toilets and digital thermostats were unknown 50 years ago, but the designs attuned to climate go a long way toward saving resources, both natural and financial.

Electric bills clearly show the pay-off -- the Scotts average $90 a month; the Ganns, $150. More important to the couples, they preserved the native settings, a giant first green step.

''We took out one major tree, a tamarind,'' Joyce Gann said.

JUST THE BASICS

At a time when they could afford few flourishes, both couples went with basics, which have proved livable and storm-worthy.

The Scotts, who wanted the simplicity of lines in a particular Japanese palace, also admired the Quaker meeting house on Sunset Drive. Architect Marion Manley had designed it, and the Scotts contacted her. Manley was the state's first licensed woman architect. She was 75 by then, but agreed to take on the Scotts' project.

Today, the wooden home in Palmetto Bay perches on a first floor of poured concrete supports. Its second floor of pine and cypress opens on all sides to the midlevel canopies of trees. Like the Ganns' home, it has no air conditioning but uses ceiling fans and transoms to move hot air up and through the house. With the living area upstairs, air circulation is excellent, the bird songs even better.

Wooden beams used in the home are Dade County pine trees that the Scotts rescued when developers cleared tracts of land. The main beam is more than 26 feet long.

After the foundation was poured, the roof raised and the framing finished, the family -- including four of their six children -- moved in.

''That's all we could afford,'' Gwladys said. ``We had no electrical, water, walls, screens. . . . We used a ladder to climb up and down. We'd fill buckets of water for the toilet.''

Eventually, of course, the house was completed. Cypress frames the screens and glass doors; glass in the doors is tempered (shatterproof), and the ceiling is an acoustical material that also is fireproof.

The Scotts say their house is so sound, ''We didn't realize how bad Hurricane Andrew was until we opened the door.'' While they slept in the hall during the 1992 storm, the walls got soaked when the north eye wall hit, peeling back some shingles and sending one branch through a corner of the roof. Because the house can be totally opened, there was no mold or mildew after the storm, they say.

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