New Studio 804 book details sustainable home design, construction methods

LAWRENCE — Dan Rockhill is convinced not only of the need to build homes sustainably, but that he’s found methods that can help owners justify the high upfront costs with the promise of far lower energy bills — to say nothing of a cleaner ecological conscience.

But when in fall 2023 the executive director of the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design's renowned Studio 804 went looking for a “green rater” to qualify the group’s 29th D.I.Y. building project for LEED Platinum status, Rockhill had a tough time finding someone to inspect it. He was disturbed by the fact that there was not a single green rater in the surrounding four-state area, ultimately hiring someone from Arkansas. So he decided to do something about it.

The thick, slipcover-bound, richly illustrated book “Studio 804: Detailing Sustainable Architecture” (Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers) edited by his associate David Sain is Rockhill’s latest contribution to the industry. It details the homes built by the classes of 2022 and 2023.

“It's like, the stuff works,” said Rockhill,  J.L. Constant Distinguished Professor of Architecture at KU. “We're just not doing a very good job of promoting it, as evidenced by the absence of green-rater availability in the metropolitan area.

“So I thought, ‘Maybe I can contribute to that conversation.’ And that's the source of this book, simply because I thought homeowners, maybe, but certainly builders, if they had any sense at all, would want to aspire to do something that addresses sustainability. Every industry has gone in that direction.”

A couple of years ago, Rockhill led the creation of another coffee-table-style book that focused on explicating Studio 804’s method of teaching student architects how their drawings become real by having them design and build a home with their own hands over the course of a school year. Studio 804 is economically self-sustaining, too.

The focus of the new book is on the methods and materials Studio 804 has used in recent years to build a pair of energy-efficient and otherwise sustainable homes in Lawrence's Pinkney Neighborhood.

Rockhill said most of the hundreds of photos in the book were taken by his students as they worked on the projects.

“The students need to do a report for me at the end of every semester,” Rockhill said. “I tell them it's the kind of thing you're going to enjoy looking at with your kids 20 years from now. Think of it like that. Give me all the photographs of you working, what you worked on, where we started, how you do these kinds of things and what you learned.

“There's a lot of meat in what they give back to me. It’s the kind of thing that I would happily share with somebody who would ask me about what the WRB is, for example. WRB is the weatherproof barrier. We do these walls that are referred to as a rain screen ... but water can get behind that, and it's the WRB that prevents it from ruining the building.

“I thought I should share this with people because it unlocks some of the mystery about how to do this kind of building.”

The new book contains an introduction and interview Sain did with Rockhill, and the rest is culled from student submissions.

“I basically said, ‘Here's the stuff. Go ahead and put this together.’ I described to him how I thought it should be organized,” Rockhill said.

Rockhill said his students readily accept the need for sustainable architecture. He said he hopes the new book will convince more architects and builders both that they can and how they can meet that need.