Green building is an important measure to deal with energy and environment problems in the construction sector of the world. In this study, knowledge mapping analysis is used, and 3,060 articles are selected for further study (1900–2019). Based on CiteSpace (5.3.R4 SE 64-bit), the knowledge base, hot topics and research trends of green-building-related research are presented. The key highlights of the overall analysis results are: (1) Research on green buildings has received more extensive attention in the 21st century. During 2000–2010, research on green buildings showed a steady growth trend. Since 2011, the amount of literature has increased rapidly, and green building research is in a period of rapid growth. (2) In the macro-disciplinary analysis, the trends and focus of applied green building research is highlighted. In addition to the environmental, political, economic, and computing fields that green building research has traditionally belonged to, in recent years, some journals have published green-building-related research in the fields of psychology, education, health, medicine, and animal science. (3) In the carrier analysis of meso-research findings, in terms of citation frequency, “Building & Environment,” “Energy & Buildings” and the “Journal of Cleaner Production” were the top three journals. In terms of influence, “Building & Environment,” “Building Research & Information” and “Solar Energy” were the top three journals. (4) In the microcosmic research topic analysis, a timeline visualization of a keyword co-occurrence network containing 14 clusters was generated. “Performance,” “Green Building,” “Sustainability,” “System” and “Construction” were the five most frequently used keywords in this field. Next, the key analysis results were: (5) According to the literature clustering results, 12 research hotspots of early research, intermediate research and recent research on green building were ascertained. (6) The indicators of the research frontier were divided into burst terms and burst articles, wherein the former was divided into four stages according to the burst order. Taking the latest frontier research as an example (i.e., barriers), the “CAPITAL” framework was constructed to overcome the barriers that inhibited the promotion of green buildings from five levels. Finally, the shortcomings of this research are summarized, and some suggestions for future research are put forward.