In what’s become an annual rite of spring, every Saturday in the middle of May the Lawrence community lines up to see a shiny new Studio 804 building, oohing and aahing like patrons at a golf tournament. (The Masters tournament comes to mind.) The analogy is not far off: following over par efforts the previous two years, the 18 students in KU’s Master of Architecture program have finally returned to red figures at 1144 East 12th St., producing one of the strongest entries in the 30-building history of 804.
Prof. Dan Rockhill’s students found their game on what might be one of the flattest, hardscrabble sites in town, located in a funky neighborhood where many of the mailboxes are leaning like tired drunks at closing time. Out of this morass has sprung an arresting, statuesque building that looks something like a cross between an Apple store and the Barcelona Pavillon, Mies van der Rohe’s seminal modernist masterpiece. Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it.
Squatting on a thick concrete plinth, the one-story house’s signature statement is a large overhang that smartly salutes the southern sky, providing ample shade in summer and solar collection in winter. The overhang and building are supported by massive structural beams called glulams, which are fully expressed in every room of the house and can be easily seen from the street through the triple-glazed living room windows. Altogether, the base, roof span, and interior structural expression dynamically uplift what would otherwise be a black slab of architecture.
“We didn’t want the building to look like it was just dropped in place, or like it was taking up so much space, or creating so much weight,” said Tristan Taylor, one of the 804 graduate students who led tours of the building at the May 16 open house. “We wanted it to look like it was sitting gracefully on the plinth overlooking the neighborhood.”
According to Taylor, the form was kept simple to make the building easier to construct and allow students to focus on technical elements, which grow more impressive every year. For 2026, Rockhill and his team is pursuing LEED v4.1 Residential certification, the latest and more rigorous version of the U.S. Green Building Council’s benchmark sustainability rating system. The next-level tech is enough to make a NASA engineer blush.
While this is all well and good, the emphasis on technology has in the past tended to colonize the imaginations of many Studio 804 students and led them down a path that has resulted in houses that were less than optimal from a functional standpoint, to put it mildly, and more about showing off fancy gadgets and fixtures. Less machines for living, to paraphrase Le Corbusier’s famous saying, than oversized smartphones with plumbing.
The temptation of tech persists—it’s a big part of the Studio 804 brand—but this year marks a notable shift in emphasis back to the human condition. Everything is on one level, entry and exits are clearly visible and convenient, and accessibility is no longer just an afterthought. For example, students widened doorways and integrated a ramp into the plinth to make it easier for wheelchairs to move about in and around the house. Kitchen cabinets were lowered, ADA compliant faucets were installed, and storage was increased. A 400-sq. ft. Accessory Dwelling Unit was created in the back to use as an extra office, 3rd bedroom, or Airbnb. These kinds of design decisions will, students hope, expand the typical buyer demographic for the home, or in other words, appeal to people who can afford them, which tends to skew older.
“I thought a lot of my grandma when we were designing this house,” said 804 grad Katelyn Fuller, who did a lot of design coordination for 1144 E. 12th St. “She always walked with a walker and had a hard time on stairs, so it was important to me that we integrated those [accessible] things.”
While the architects may have aced the functional program, they swung and missed in several areas that may turn off some potential buyers, who are looking at an asking price of $690,000 for the property. Most glaring is a lack of basic landscaping, which as it currently stands renders the house less like a serene modernist retreat and more like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey after it has crash-landed in a vacant lot off Haskell Ave. Another issue, much further down the hierarchy of problems but nevertheless important, is basic fit and finish. Though improved compared to some previous 804 houses I’ve toured, it falls short of buyer expectations at this price range.
I asked Fuller about some of these bogeys, thinking that I could catch her off guard on something she and her amateur cohorts had overlooked, missed, or disregarded. Not a chance. Landscaping? The house, as it turns out, is built on a former junkyard—a so-called ‘brownfield’ site—with soil quality so poor students ran out of time to complete their landscaping plans. Fit and finish? Students did mock-ups of kitchen cabinets in their warehouse to prepare for a professional install but found it exceptionally difficult to adjust their custom fronts with the underlying Ikea hardware on site.
Most flaws in 804 projects are artifacts of limited material choices—the program relies on donations, deep discounts, and the good will of vendors across the country—and the reality that students have never built a house before. By the same token, the fact that the design-build program continues to produce some of the most progressive architecture in the Midwest, if not the whole country, the burden of expectations to create standout architecture year after year mounts.
And students keep upping their game. Thinking I was architecturally astute by asking why the 804 team didn’t extend the lovely structural beams through the exterior—the quintessential midcentury modern look—Fuller quickly put me in my place.
“If the gluelam was set into the wall, their foundation footings could crack if one side settles faster than the other,” she said.
Just when you think you’ve outsmarted these students, they’ve got an answer that makes you go “aah.”
—Bill
Lawrence Modern home 