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comment Students Design-Build LEED Platinum Art Center for Tornado Ravaged Town
A team of 22 third-year architectural students, led by professor Dan Rockhill of the University of Kansas, have completed an ambitious project to design and build a LEED Platinum arts center for the tornado devastated town of Greensburg, Kansas. Ninety-five percent of Greensburg was wiped off the map in May of 2007 by an unprecedented EF-5 tornado, displacing 1,400 residents and liquidating the town’s infrastructure.
Charles Linn, an editor at GreenSource's sister publication Architectural Record, travels to Greensburg, Kansas, and reports on Studio 804's new 5.4.7. Arts Center. Watch the video above, and read his story on Architectural Record's Web site.
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Rather than abandon their home, Greensburg’s leadership decided to rebuild the town from the ground up as a green oasis, fully integrating sustainable attributes into the fabric of the community, as a return to the conservationist spirit of early farmers and pioneers. The town passed a groundbreaking resolution, committing all publicly owned buildings in the new Greensburg to LEED Platinum certification. When the students of the innovative design-build architectural program at the University of Kansas, Studio 804, got wind of the ambitious project, they decided to volunteer their time and energy to an even more ambitious sub-project: designing and building the LEED-Platinum 5.4.7 Arts Center (named after the date of the Tornado, 5-4-07) in under six months.
The efforts of the architecture students and professor Dan Rockhill are chronicled in a new run of Discovery Science’s Build it Bigger program, which airs on Saturdays. The team was put under the dual, self-imposed pressures of achieving LEED Platinum status, a feat unachieved by any professional Kansan architect, and meeting the deadline of the one-year anniversary of the fateful tornado. Some of the design techniques used to earn the Platinum rating included open skylights with automatic rain detectors, a south-oriented green glass wall that maximizes light and heat in winter months, ultra-dense cellulose insulation, salvaged material from a defunct Kansan munitions plant, photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and a small energy-saving 1,680-square-foot floor plan.
The total construction costs for the Arts Center came to around $336,000, says Rockhill,though the director of 5.4.7 estimates the building’s value at double the official cost, given the amount of material donations and free labor involved. According to Discovery Science, Greensburg’s recovery is progressing well, as over 750 of the town’s residents have returned.
Editors’ Note: The original version of this article gave an inaccurate figure for the total construction cost of the project. It has been revised above to reflect free labor and donated materials.
