Studio 804: Book showcases KU students’ sustainable architecture
It’s not easy building green, but it’s doable—and ‘Detailing Sustainable Architecture’ shows how.
Students in the School of Architecture & Design are drawn to Studio 804, KU’s innovative and award-winning architecture course, because it allows them to get out of the classroom and onto the job site, where they earn valuable hands-on experience designing and building a structure from start to finish over the span of a single academic year.
Since launching the course in 1995 with a project to stabilize the Barber School, a 19th-century stone structure at Clinton Lake in Douglas County, Dan Rockhill, J.L. Constant Distinguished Professor of Architecture, has helped students in the fifth-year capstone class tackle increasingly complex projects, on campus and off. Their work has won numerous architecture prizes, and 18 of the structures have been certified as LEED Platinum, the highest Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating granted by the U.S. Green Building Council. The studio’s 19th LEED building is scheduled to be completed in May.
Yet demand for such energy-efficient buildings hasn’t taken off with the general public, and Rockhill hopes a new book that documents Studio 804’s most recent projects will help change that.
Studio 804: Detailing Sustainable Architecture, a handsome, extensively illustrated volume, uses construction drawings and more than 400 photographs to explain the painstaking process by which KU students created LEED Platinum homes in 2022 and 2023. The hope is that more people can be convinced they too can tackle a green building project.
“I think it’s important to share, be it with prospective homebuyers or builders, how it is that we do what needs to be done to achieve these LEED ratings,” Rockhill says. “It’s not that they aren’t aspiring to LEED Platinum; I just don’t think they’re doing it enough.”
The less-than-robust demand for highly efficient buildings was driven home for Rockhill when he set out to find a new green energy rater after the one he’d used for years retired. Raters are responsible for evaluating structures to ensure they meet strict standards for LEED certification.
Rockhill was shocked to find no one available in the Kansas City region to replace the previous rater, who was based in Springfield, Missouri.
“That was a little bit alarming to me,” Rockhill says. “So I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should do something about it.’”
The book is edited by David Sain, lecturer in the School of Architecture & Design and a longtime associate in Rockhill’s private firm, Rockhill and Associates. It includes material gathered through Sain’s interviews with Rockhill, and it draws heavily on documents produced by students during the class. (While Studio 804 is lauded for extensive hands-on learning on the job site, there is still plenty of paperwork involved in the process.) The book is a bit of a hybrid: Outstanding art direction by publisher Oscar Riera Ojeda and vivid color shots by photographer Corey Gaffer that illustrate the beauty of the finished buildings contribute to the hefty, slipcovered volume’s elegant, coffee-table feel. At the same time, the detail of the photos and schematics focused on the step-by-step processes makes the book a practical resource for anyone who might be thinking of tackling such a complex project.
“It sort of becomes a handbook, if you wanted to use it to that extent,” Rockhill says of what he sees as the book’s appeal to homebuyers, builders and architects. “I think it’s important to me to understand that small firms, especially, might find it useful to have something they can point out to clients and say, ‘Hey, this stuff works and here’s why we’re doing it.’”
Studio 804: Detailing Sustainable Architecture can also be a valuable tool for education. Rockhill foresees using it with his students in the future, and he often fields inquiries from administrators and students at other universities who are interested in starting similar design-build programs or who just want to learn more about specific Studio 804 projects. But there is also another audience that he hopes to enlighten: the general public.
He’s already seen progress in that area, but more can be done.
“Years ago, people would drive by (the job site) and give us the finger,” Rockhill muses, “but now people are actually interested. They’re willing to accept the fact that houses look different simply because a lot of the materials we use are indeed different. People don’t dismiss it as quickly, which is nice.”
Steven Hill is associate editor of Kansas Alumni magazine.
Top photo by Corey Gaffer
Brook Street photo courtesy of Studio 804
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