In its effort to rebuild, the Greensburg city council passed a law requiring all publicly funded buildings to be built to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Platinum standards—the first city in the nation to mandate this green protocol.
Studio 804 was a huge part of it. Rockhill’s students that year completed the first public facility in Greensburg—the Greensburg Art Center that became the first LEED Platinum building in the state of Kansas and the first one designed and built by students.
Fast-forward to today, and Studio 804 has completed a huge range of projects—from small-scale homes to $1.8 million education buildings.
The program is also on its eighth LEED Platinum project.
“There’s not a professional firm in the world that can boast of that many LEED Platinum projects,” Rockhill says.
This year’s class just completed a residence that can claim LEED Platinum and Passive House certifications.
As if those two goals weren’t enough for this group, Wolfrum said they’re also aiming for net-zero energy usage on the home.
Maximizing the “R”
While net-zero energy consumption is a lofty aspiration, it’s not an outlandish one. Just look at Seattle’s Bullitt Center (another R-Guard project), which just became a certified Living Building and collects more energy than it consumes.
R-Guard air and water barriers have long been used on the world’s highest-achieving structures. And through a recent donation, PROSOCO is now proud to have its R-Guard products on Studio 804’s most recent work.
R-Guard products also helped the project go far beyond Passive House levels of air changes per hour on the building envelope.
The students used PROSOCO’s R-Guard Joint & Seam Filler over the roof and wall sheathing, FastFlash around the windows and doors (Wolfrum says it’s probably the deepest application of it we’ve seen on the 18-inch-thick walls), Cat 5 over the exterior walls and Air Dam around the windows.
As soon as he started working with the R-Guard products, Wolfrum noticed their durability.
“That’s probably the most important thing,” he says. “This isn’t something like a Tyvek or just a paper that’s going to fall off.”
He also appreciated the color-coded components of the system.
“You can really tell when it’s been applied properly,” Wolfrum says. “We like to think we’re very capable, but we haven’t experienced a lot of these things before, so a system that you can see the pink is covering all the seams, and you get red continuously through your windows. Just making sure the layers are all there. It’s a lot simpler, it’s easy to apply, quick, straightforward. Those things really matter to us in terms of our timeline.”
An initial blower door test produced a result of 0.29 ACH50, which beats the Passive House level of 0.6 ACH50 by more than half.
The R-value of the wall assembly (which Rockhill predicted would net out around 50 to 55) ended up at 62, blowing away a typical R-value result of 19 to 30 in conventional construction.
The Next Frontier
After the project wrapped up this summer, Wolfrum and 15 other bootcamp survivors headed off on the start of their respective career paths. For Wolfrum, that means working on a residential construction job in Alaska. Ideally, he’d like to specialize as a Passive House consultant or a sustainability coordinator.
Wherever he ultimately lands, Wolfrum recognizes that he’ll have a leg up over his peers seeking the best jobs in the industry.
“Studio 804 puts you above anyone who’s only had the studio experience,” he says. “Before starting bootcamp half of us didn’t know how you would detail a window opening or what spacing a stud is in a house. That is I think the main advantage of having that on-site experience. Seeing how things go together and being a part of it. You could be qualified to go work construction, or oversee construction, or work in an architecture office. There’s a lot of different options from this that it opens you up to.”