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One Man's Vernacular
Battling conservative local tastes and easily confused contractors, architect
Dan Rockhill takes matters into his own hands.
By Daniel Akst
July 2003
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Inspired by gas-pumping stations and industrial distribution centers, this
prairie home (above and below) designed and built by Rockhill and Associates
measures 110 feet long and 24 feet wide. It is situated ten miles west of
Lawrence, Kansas, an otherwise liberal college town still struggling to accept
Modernist forms.
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Dan Rockhill
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Offsite:
Rockhill and Associates,
www.rockhillandassociates.com |
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Rockhill constructed steel-frame, continuous-louver windows to filter the
glaring mid-day sun (above and below).
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Seen from a distance, Barry and Sue Newton's house floats on the Kansas
prairie, the curved roof and broadly corrugated red flanks suggesting
a railcar momentarily at rest before resuming its journey across the plains.
At once stately and utilitarian, the building's long low volume seems perfectly
adapted to its grassy site. The house was designed by local architect Dan
Rockhill, who has made a career of what might be called "Kansas Modernism,"
taking inspiration from the utilitarian structures of the plains for expressive
dwellings that come by their rough surfaces and brawny materials with unusual
honesty. What makes the house so different for Rockhill is that this time
no one is mad at him--not even the Newtons, who had enough of a sense of
humor during the project to refer to themselves, when leaving messages on
his answering machine, as "the fucking clients."
Barry Newton is a colleague of Rockhill's in the architecture department
at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence. That the house doesn't have a
sod roof or an elaborate metal framework hovering over the side yard, or
irate neighbors at the brink of forming a mob, is a testament to the restraint
of all parties involved--and the wisdom of building in the middle of nowhere.
That the house exists at all is, like most of Rockhill's work, a testament
to his talent, tenacity, and unique approach to design.
Some architects pander to popular tastes. Others have only a minimal understanding
of what it takes to actually build the places they design. No one will ever
accuse Rockhill of these sins. The rangy 55-year-old former mechanic is
never insulated from the consequences of his inspirations for a simple reason--he
builds what he designs. With a small crew, Rockhill and Associates does
the construction and produces custom items in its own rural shop, including
the elaborate metalwork that is its trademark. Because off-the-shelf windows
lack character, the firm fabricates its own steel frames. Sometimes
the architect will even do the wiring or dig the septic system.
Building the houses he designs is an essential part of Rockhill's formula
for creating architecture he believes in. It gives him complete control
over what gets made while sparing clients the discouraging risk premium
that most contractors build into their bids whenever confronted with unorthodox
modern design. Working from Rockhill's own barn, the firm has scant
overhead, generates minimal paperwork, and can handle complications "without
the spirit-sapping trail of change orders and meetings" associated
with typical architect-contractor relations. "It is hard to imagine
a way to create a challenging but affordable building with an emphasis on
materials," Rockhill says, "unless you have the money to overwhelm
the doubt of a contractor or, as we have chosen, do it yourself."
The result is a growing body of inspired architecture that drives some people
in this comfortable college town crazy--including possibly Rockhill himself,
who remains passionately committed to cutting-edge design but sometimes
seems worn down by an uncomprehending community. "It gets to the point,"
he says, "where I'm almost afraid to use my own name to order a pizza."
At one Rockhill-designed house, a fistfight broke out between
a neighbor and a member of the construction crew. At another one--a large
concrete volume studded with metal awnings in a neighborhood of upscale
tract homes--someone spray-painted a warning: "Paint this or I will."
On yet another occasion the local newspaper editorialized against a classically
Modern gem that Rockhill and his students were erecting--for free, aside
from materials--for a low-income handicapped person. A house he built on
speculation took him more than a year to sell at a loss, despite an affordable
price and a strong local real estate market. The place later graced the
cover of a design magazine.
Even on the prairie Rockhill gets in trouble. His elegant Japanese-inspired
concrete house for a University of Kansas business professor was to include
a garden shed, but to comply with restrictive land covenants it had to look
like a garage. Rockhill produced a luminous little structure with corrugated
fiberglass walls, but a neighbor complained and the architect was forced
to cover them up. To Rockhill, "the final indignity" was
that the same neighbor was allowed to put up a prefab metal shed, no questions
asked.
So is it Lawrence or Rockhill? Probably a bit of both. Lawrence is a charming
and eminently livable college town of about 85,000 people that offers plenty
in the way of organic foods and authentic urbanism but remains far more
conservative than such coastal counterparts as Berkeley or Northampton.
"To build in Lawrence," Rockhill says, "an increasing portion
of your budget has to go toward cultural conformity in one form or another."
Newton, who is perhaps a more objective observer, says, "When it comes
to housing, Lawrence is an incredibly conservative place--just like most
other places."
Then there is Rockhill, a lean and glamorous figure who has a weakness
for complicated-looking canopies and metal structures in wood-frame neighborhoods.
This is also a man who has friction with his clients even though he builds
many of his houses for far less than most contractors would charge. "Every
client we've had, we ended up fighting with," he acknowledges.
"One of the few exceptions would be the Newtons."
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Industrial-style details include exposed iron truss-work in the main living
areas (visible in the section drawing above and axonometric below), a
corrugated steel roof, and a sand-blasted glass partition wall
(bottom).
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Dan Rockhill
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Rockhill gets in trouble partly because of his insistence on adventurous
design for infill lots in established Lawrence neighborhoods. Consider
the austere home he designed and built for a pair of artists--the house
that inspired the "paint me" graffiti. A large bluff concrete
rectangle with a V-shaped roof and a lot of exposed hardware, the 5,000-square-foot
home is wedged into a narrow lot amid some undistinguished conventional
homes. It is anything but unobtrusive. "That thing drew just a tremendous
outcry from the community," recalls Ann Gardner, editorial-page editor
of the Lawrence Journal-World. "It wasn't just us. We got tons
of letters to the editor about what an eyesore it was."
Rockhill is unrepentant, complaining that no one seems to raise a fuss about
the aesthetics of the big-box retailers on the edge of town or the astonishingly
banal town houses that could as easily be in suburban Boston or Seattle.
"We're good at galvanizing neighborhood associations," he says.
"If you don't have an association already, you will when we show up."
The difficulty may be that while Rockhill is obsessed with the muscular
vernacular of utilitarian structures on the Kansas plains, the contemporary
idiom in Lawrence, like most other places, is the generic tract home. Even
before "developer pastiche" swept aside earlier indigenous styles,
the prevailing look in town was more citified farmhouse than industrial
shed. At the Eldridge Hotel, a classic old brick pile in the heart of the
city, the aesthetic runs to hideous wallpaper and scary baroque chairs.
Is there any historical reason to privilege lovingly cast concrete and handmade
metal window frames?
"What we're doing is using the language of the materials of the region,"
Rockhill insists as we drive around in his pickup truck. "I don't think
people who live in houses described as 'colonial' or 'French Provincial'
have a lot of reason to throw stones." Over dinner Rockhill and his
low-key associate David Sain, whom he credits frequently, talk about why
it was that in the Fifties people embraced new design. They had faith
in the future, Sain suggests. I offer the theory that the acceptance of
advanced design is in inverse proportion to the rate of social change. Technology,
immigration, labor-force mobility, the changing role of women, the splintering
family, and other developments have resulted in enormous social flux,
with nostalgia correspondingly manifest in people's home design preferences--even
to the extent that the Fifties themselves are in. During our travels
around Lawrence, Rockhill and I observe that there are a lot more people
who can afford the kind of faux château that we pass here and there
on the prairie.
When I ask if he'd ever consider doing a traditional house for a paying
customer, Rockhill says, "I just couldn't do it." On the contrary,
as a professor
he runs a program called Studio 804 that builds extraordinary
little contemporary houses for a local nonprofit organization on behalf
of disadvantaged citizens. In his private practice, Rockhill is so determined
to experiment that he designs and builds homes for reasonably affluent
clients at astonishingly low prices. The graffiti house, for example,
was executed for about $50 a square foot, including a munificent design
fee of $2,500. The business professor's house was done for about $95 a square
foot--including site work and plaster walls instead of Sheetrock. "We
want to do architecture," Rockhill says. "But we want to stop
giving it away."
Maybe Freud was right about fees being therapeutic because Rockhill charged
the Newtons a more reasonable $300,000 and everyone seems to have gotten
along. It probably helped that as an architect Newton understands that house
projects generate "a lot of passion and a preposterous amount of money
at risk." Newton hired Rockhill instead of designing his own home because,
he says, he didn't trust any builders in the area to undertake the job.
Newton says that he laid out the rooms and sited the house but credits Rockhill
with the design.
The Newton house, as Rockhill writes in a forthcoming book about his work,
"is a simple form inspired by common industrial buildings that abound
in the landscape as pumping stations and distribution centers for liquid
and natural gas and oil." The corrugated-steel roof was rolled by a
grain bin manufacturing company and hovers above the house on a series of
exposed custom truss works. Continuous louvers--perforated concrete soffit
panels--help provide shade from the blazing summer sun and emphasize the
horizontality of the design, as do the broad corrugations of the Danish
cement fiberboard panels whose red is drawn from the color of the silos--made
of reddish "silo block"--commonly found in rural Kansas. The Newton
interior features Rockhill's familiar industrial aesthetic, including polished
concrete floors, a lot of gleaming metal, and sandblasted glass partitions
and countertops.
"I think that's an incredible house--it's really a machine," says
New York architect Walter Chatham, whose work shares a similar aesthetic.
"It looks like it belongs on some high-tech French rail siding."
Chatham says it reminds him of the work of Glenn Murcutt, the Australian
architect who happened to be in Lawrence--with Rockhill--when his Pritzker
Prize was announced. Newton and Rockhill admire Murcutt, but for Newton
the paintings of Mark Rothko were also an inspiration. After a storm, Newton
says, you get the sun coming out of the west, illuminating the prairie beneath
the clouds, "so the ground is paler than the sky." Best of all,
clients and architect are still speaking. "Dan is demanding and difficult,"
Newton says. "That's why I wanted him to build the house."
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