Platinum at a Price

In the Kansas City that’s in Kansas—the dowdy stepsister of its larger and more glamorous namesake across the Missouri River—the vast stockyards are idle now, and the wealth they once produced is a thing of the past. But drive around some of the city’s weary neighborhoods, and here and there, between blue-collar cottages in varying traditional styles and states of dishevelment, you will stumble across a miracle of affordable modernism.

These small homes, surely among the most gorgeous modular houses ever built, are the creation of the University of Kansas’s remarkable Studio 804 design-build program, which aims to teach young architects-to-be not just how to design, nor even merely how to build, but also how to cope. For students, the process is essentially architectural boot camp run by a professor-cum-drill-sergeant named Dan Rockhill. He’s a hard-assed modernist who tries to balance his quest for perfection with an understanding of the 22 “fragile young egos” working with him each year on the annual Studio 804 project.

But this year’s structure, completed in May, is more than just a cool house. It’s also a shining example of state-of-the-art sustainable design—and an illustration of the aesthetic and financial challenges sustainable design presents, especially in a place like the Midwest, with its brutal climatic extremes. In Kansas City, architects have to worry not just about heating and cooling but about tornadoes.

It’s hard not to love Studio 804, which has always mixed mouth-watering modernism with ample social conscience. Its previous stick-built houses, in Lawrence, Kansas, where the university is located, were designed for the disadvantaged yet stand as a glorious rebuke to the notion that low cost (or low income) must mean dreary. When the program turned to Kansas City, where many lots were available at little or no cost and local community-development organizations wanted to participate, Rockhill had no intention of trying to site the studio’s work in the most comfortable part of town. “We seek out neighborhoods on the fringe,” he says, “often in need of some resuscitation.”

That’s when Studio 804 shifted to building in a large warehouse near campus and then trucking its work 40 miles to the city for assembly. Doing construction in a factory was less worrisome than dispatching students day after day onto I-70. The physical constraints dictated by the need to transport modules imposed a useful discipline on student designers. And since all the construction had to be done in a semester, building indoors provided valuable protection from weather delays, to say nothing of frostbite.

The four beautifully detailed homes produced this way were all made to sit relatively lightly on the planet—especially the fourth home, a crisp composition of wooden slats and snow-white panels. It features renewable materials, such as Forest Stewardship Council–certified Brazilian hardwood cladding and cellulose insulation, coupled with savvy low-tech strategies like a white roof to reflect the punishing summer sun and windows massed on the south side to maximize solar gain in winter.

The modular houses went pretty far toward sustainability, but in 2008 Studio 804 took ecologically minded construction to a whole new level, turning its attention to the small town of Greensburg, Kansas, which was almost entirely wiped out by a devastating tornado in 2007. Following the disaster, Greensburg decided to rebuild as a green community, and the city council mandated that all municipally owned buildings larger than 4,000 square feet had to meet the stringent LEED Platinum standards. The sleek modular arts center that Studio 804 produced for the town just a year after the destruction was lauded by then Governor Kathleen Sebelius and became the first LEED Platinum building in the state of Kansas.

Likewise, Studio 804’s latest effort, built on-site in the Rosedale neighborhood of Kansas City because of its size and gabled form, became the state’s first LEED Platinum house when it won certification in January. It will also be capable of functioning off the electrical grid—and feeding solar-generated electricity back into it. Building a Platinum, environmentally conscious home in the frayed community is in keeping with Studio 804’s history, not to mention Rockhill’s views on climate change. But there were pedagogical as well as ethical reasons for taking on the challenge. “Having gone through a LEED experience gives the students a leg up on employment,” Rockhill says, because “sustainability is at the forefront of the industry.”

The shape of the Rosedale house, like nearly every other aspect of the project, was strongly influenced by the standards developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, as well as by the desire to demonstrate that a substantial photovoltaic array could be integrated into a typical roof line. “We wanted it to look somewhat conventional,” Rockhill says.

The structure’s bluff face, a thinly disguised set of garage doors, is also partly the result of the environmental agenda, since moving the garage off to the side, the way it was done in other Studio 804 designs, would have meant a lot more paved driveway. In fact, the aesthetic challenges are evident at the very front edge of the property; instead of crisp-white conventional concrete, the driveway and walk are paved in a nubby, permeable species of concrete that looks and feels like white asphalt, edged wittily in coal. Rockhill explains that to get Platinum certification, a house can’t merely dump runoff into a sewer or allow paved areas to flood willy-nilly onto neighboring land. “You take responsibility for your storm water by absorbing it,” he says.

The result is a barnlike dwelling that trades the smoldering sex appeal of its modular predecessors for the more mature virtues of ecological purity. Yet once you get to know the 2,500-square-foot house at 3716 Springfield Street, it reveals itself to be sexy indeed, in its own more than skin-deep way. How else to describe the matte-black kitchen countertops of paper composite? Or the blindingly glossy epoxy paint that, despite the absence of volatile organic chemicals, makes the downstairs floors look like polished onyx?

Rainwater is collected for use in the garden. Wells tap into the earth to provide geothermal heating and cooling. The flooring upstairs is a luscious but environmentally correct jatobá (also known as Brazilian cherry) that is the color of dried blood. Parts of the house are made from 60-year-old Douglas fir recycled from a disused munitions plant in De Soto, Kansas. Forty feet of high-efficiency glass on the south side are shaded by louvers that were carefully placed to maximize passive solar gain in the winter while blocking the baking summer sun. The living-room windows look out on a small wind turbine that supplies extra power. The cladding is rich-looking South American hardwood (with FSC certification, of course).

Rockhill was determined not to let the LEED requirements dictate the house’s shape altogether. “Although we have an eye on LEED, we don’t let it have such a pronounced impact that it shackles our design intent,” he says. For example, the Springfield Street design called for quite a bit of glass. “We liked the openness of the end elevations expressing the volume of the space and wanted to work like hell to keep that quality,” Rockhill says. That meant paying through the nose for the highest-performing window assemblies made in North America. Off-the-shelf products simply wouldn’t have made the cut for LEED.