Platinum at a Price

The windows weren’t the only thing that cost a great deal of money—the photo-voltaics alone exceeded $25,000—and Rockhill unfortunately decided to spend it at just the wrong time. Studio 804’s stunning modular designs had won international acclaim and, in Kansas, a waiting list of potential buyers, even though each home is tucked into a rumpled-looking block where modest older homes sell for a lot less. The reason was that the student-designed modulars were an incredible bargain. Rockhill recalls selling the first for just $140,000—and having built it for less. He sold the fourth of the series for $200,000. “We even have knockoffs,” he exults, showing off a couple of boxy imitators near one of the Studio 804 projects.

Emboldened by the success of the smaller houses and the Rosedale site’s proximity to the University of Kansas Medical Center, a source of well-paid employment—and thus potential buyers—Rockhill and Studio 804 embarked on a much more ambitious project involving cutting-edge technology and design. They poured $310,000 into the Springfield Street house, along with $350,000 of in-kind donations. (At Studio 804, cultivating and soliciting donors is as much a part of the learning process as framing walls.) Then there’s all that unpaid student labor.

The upshot is a costly house indeed, in a low-income neighborhood; in January, the home had already been marked down once and was on the market for $325,000, with no takers. The timing was simply unlucky. Although Kansas City didn’t have the kind of real estate bubble seen in Las Vegas or Miami, the downturn struck here too. In November, the average new home sold for $280,350, off from $325,559 a year earlier.

Then again, Dan Rockhill has never been about money, and, of course, neither has Studio 804. In his private practice, the 62-year-old architect has single-mindedly devoted himself to his own distinctive brand of Great Plains modernism, producing uncompromising designs that he builds with his own team so that he can control every aspect of the process—even when the process makes little sense for him financially. For some lucky (and, often as not, ungrateful) clients, he has essentially worked for free.

As for Studio 804, it has always been not-for-profit, except to the extent that it profits the students who cycle through the program each year and gain the priceless experience of dreaming up a house and then taking tools in hand to turn their plans into a livable reality. At Studio 804, students do everything from figuring out how to work cooperatively to negotiating conservative local housing authorities in a permit process that regularly drives Rockhill up the wall. He has learned that, in prying loose the necessary approvals, seeking sympathy is sometime s more effective than submitting ironclad calculations. When students divide up tasks, he tells them, “If you cry easily, you go to the building inspector.”

The overall experience can be brutal. The first semester, devoted to studio work, is integrated with other classes, but then the real work begins. Students give up part of their winter vacation, workdays start by 7 a.m., and toward the end of a project, everyone is working seven days a week, sometimes into the night. Although esteemed, Studio 804 is not overwhelmed by applicants every year. It’s just too tough, says Rockhill. But those who get through it seem to understand what they’ve accomplished. “I have a hard time putting into words how much I learned being put through that trial by fire,” says Jared Eder, who is now with the firm Ellerbe Becket in the other Kansas City. Asked about Rockhill, Eder says with something like awe that the man who runs the program “knows more than he’ll ever let you know that he knows.”

“It’s the most valuable class I’ve ever had at KU,” says Frank Lindemann, who spent seven years at Kansas earning undergraduate and graduate degrees, culminating in the Springfield Street project, before joining H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, in New York. “Without the experience at 804,” he adds, citing the impression it made at his interview, “I probably wouldn’t have a job.”

Like most Studio 804 projects, the Springfield Street house was built at breakneck speed—around three and a half months. Lindemann, who was the designated concrete guy, had little knowledge of the unforgiving stuff and anxiously studied up, gathering tools and consulting with a helpful old pro who was available to answer questions. He recalls that students argued over the shade of white they would use for the interior walls. “You get beaten down to your core,” he wrote in a Studio 804 publication, “and you rebuild from there.” John Gillham, another Studio 804 alum, could have been speaking for many when he described his time in the program as “the most difficult and frustrating period of my life” as well as “the single most rewarding experience of my life.”

For Rockhill, the Springfield Street project has had its frustrations as well. “What I have learned from Springfield,” Rockhill says via e-mail, “is basically, despite the housing downturn, that the second tier of housing—as opposed to ‘entry level,’ where we have had considerable success—may be a distant target for us in the future and we should stay within the confines of what works. With Springfield we were ahead of the curve, and it may take some time for the market to see the benefit in our area.”

So he’s taking the program back to its roots and, this year, emphasizing great design and sustainability in affordable housing. He’s already got the site picked out—a lot in the city’s Prescott neighborhood—and an ambitious target price of under $180,000 for the finished house, despite an environmental profile far superior to that of a conventional home. “As I tell my students,” Rockhill says, “if we don’t, who does?”