Architecture students find no buyers for green homes (GreenHouse)

Jul 23, 2010

Architecture students find no buyers for green homes

06:39 PM

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Courtesy of Studio 804

Dan Rockhill's architecture students build award-winning green homes, including a new ultra-efficient one in Kansas City, Kansas, but they can't sell the last two.

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Courtesy of Studio 804

"Our story is just heartbreaking," saysRockhill, a renowned professor at the University of Kansas School of Architecture, Design & Planning. He runs thenonprofit Studio 804, which solicits donations so graduate students can design and build a home each year.

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"I can't sell this house," he says of their latest project, a three-bedroom, two-bath home begun in January and completed in May. He says the house, currently listed for $190,000, is easily worth twice that amount, given its free student labor and corporate donations.

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Courtesy of Studio 804

Besides, Rockhill expects it will soon make history as the first in Kansas to earn certification from the Passive House Institute, a green building standard that requires homes use up to 90% less energy than regular homes via superior insulation and duct sealing.

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Courtesy of Studio 804

The 1,700 square footPrescott Passive House -- chosen as "This Week'sGreen House" -- is also slated to earn the top or platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The students' 2009 project also achieved that honor but it, too, remains on the market, unsold.

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Courtesy of Studio 804

"It's discouraging," Rockhill says, noting that many people "talk the talk" about sustainability but don't want to pay a bit more for it. He says area homes by production builders sell for about $140,000. Also, he says, the economic slump hasn't helped.

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Courtesy of Studio 804

New homebuyers are increasingly interested in energy-efficient upgrades, but they won't pay much more for them, preferring instead to spend extra bucks on cosmetics items like granite counterops, according to research by the National Association of Home Builders.

As a result, more large homebuilders -- including KB Home, Pulte Homes, Beazer Homes, Miami-based Lennar Homes and Arizona-based Meritage --are including green features as part of their standard packages.

They're not, however, as deeply green as the Prescott Passive House.

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Courtesy of Studio 804

Studio 804, which gets no university funding but has built 15 homes since 1995, now has $25 in its checking account and is "essentially bankrupt," he says.

It wasn't always so grim. Rockhill says his students built four prefabricated urban homes between 2004 and 2007, ranging in price from $140,000 to $200,000, that sold like "hotcakes." He says they were snatched up young hipsters who "read Dwell magazine and want something cool."

Their 2008 home, built in Greensburg where a 2007 tornado leveled the town, was the first in Kansas to receive USGBC's platinum rating.

"We do our own concrete and framing work," not to mention electrical and plumbing, he says proudly, adding that few architecture programs have students actually build homes. "I do it not to make them better builders but better architects."

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Courtesy of Studio 804

To achieve efficiency, this year's airtight home uses high performance windows, southern orientation and lots of insulation (16" thick walls and 22" thick roof.) An energy recovery ventilator circulates fresh air.

Studio 804's homes are unabashedly modern and forward-thinking. Its methods are exacting. As Treehugger's Lloyd Alternotes, Metropolis did an interesting article earlier this year about the program. Here's an excerpt:

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....

"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."