photo by: Contributed

The 2025 Studio 804 house at 1040 New York St.

For graduate students in the University of Kansas’ architecture school, the final exam isn’t just a couple of hours long, and you’ll need more than a pencil and paper to take it.

As a last step to earning their degrees, the students in the master’s program spend a year in the school’s Studio 804 capstone course, where they design and construct a real-life single-family home themselves. Sometimes they work 12- or 14-hour days, drilling, framing, leveling concrete and learning firsthand just how much labor goes into even a simple two- or three-bedroom home.

Learning these skills lays a stronger foundation for these young architects, even if they won’t be using them every day in their careers, said professor Dan Rockhill, who has led Studio 804 for three decades now.

“Having these kids kind of get their hands in the concrete and learn from that experience — not that they’re going to be concrete workers, but it begins to build confidence in their learning,” Rockhill said. “That’s really an important part of this experience, because, you know, none of them have ever done anything quite like this.”

The house on New York Street has already been sold and is waiting for its new owners to move in, but on Saturday the public got a chance to tour it. It’s a sleek 1,850-square-foot abode with solar panels, a rain garden and many more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly touches. There are two bedrooms in the main building, plus a third one with a full bathroom and kitchen above the detached garage that can be used as a short-term rental space, Rockhill said.

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Students atop the 2025 Studio 804 House at 1040 New York St.

Some might call it minimalist, but the students know it’s anything but simple.

The Studio 804 students often work seven days a week on the home, and sometimes they’re there for more than a full eight-hour workday. There’s not much time for anything else, said Studio 804 graduate Coral Aboud — no other jobs, no other classes — but the work is plenty fulfilling.

“I love this house,” Aboud said. “Like, there’s so much pride in everything that we do here, because we do look at every single detail of it.”

• • •

That starts with the design process — which has its own frustrations, because the 20 or so student designers have to come to an agreement on everything from what color the trim of the house will be to what kind of stairwell to use.

Many of the decisions on this year’s house were about making it more functional. Of course, there’s the obvious array of 16 solar panels on the roof, which Rockhill said could bring the home’s energy use down to net zero.

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Solar panels being installed at the Studio 804 house at 1040 New York St.

But, as Studio 804 graduate Madeline Bachelor said, there are also “a lot of kind of hidden sustainable efforts … that aren’t as visible.”

You won’t see any gutters or downspouts on the building’s exterior, because they’re concealed within the walls and buried in the concrete, she said. They eventually lead out to the southern lawn and the rain garden.

“It’s about being thoughtful about where that rain water goes and making sure not to have too much just run off, but also not having these huge, kind of unattractive downspouts or gutters plastered on the side of our house,” Bachelor said.

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Madeline Bachelor tapes the outer “cocoon” for a window at the Studio 804 house at 1040 New York St.

The polished concrete in the home’s kitchen and entryway is recycled, said graduate Caleb Tatley. And the adhesives throughout the building are carefully chosen so as not to release harsh chemicals as they age.

“So, even though you don’t see it, we still try to incorporate every little thing into the project,” Tatley said.

The geometry of the home is just as important as the materials that go into it. Rockhill said the home is designed to be naturally cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.

“The angle of the sun changes between summer and winter, and so the (house) canopy shades for the summertime. But in the wintertime, when we want to get as much sunlight in the interior as possible, we’re able to do that by calculating overhangs,” he said. “And so when the angle of the sun is lower, it shines on the interior and warms up the floor.”

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Charlie Allen screeds the concrete to flatten it while his classmates in KU’s Studio 804 push it into place.

Of course, there’s room for a few flashy touches, as well, like a lit, recessed handrail on the way up to the second floor, which had never been done in a Studio 804 project before.

“It was something that we had to really fight for as a class to kind of get it done,” said graduate Andrew Pottinger. “There hadn’t really been an 804 detail like that, and it’s a fairly new kind of detail that we’ve seen popping up in popular architecture magazines.”

At the start, many students don’t have much experience working with their hands to put all of these things together. But Aboud said they’re now much more comfortable with that work.

“It’s a completely different relationship with these tools now,” Aboud said, “… just even knowing the names of them, and like understanding, you know, subcontractor language and contractor language in this is really unique.”

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Students put wood on top of a steel frame at the 2025 Studio 804 house at 1040 New York St.

• • •

Soon, this house will be occupied by its new owners, a couple who work in academia and moved away from Lawrence a few years ago but wanted to return here, Rockhill said. And then Rockhill will be doing some shopping of his own to secure next year’s Studio 804 construction site.

“It’s hard finding property,” said Rockhill, who’s already started his search. “Lawrence is a very desirable location, (and) I’m under a time frame that means I’ve got to hit the ground running.”

Making things more complicated is that the most common types of properties that come up for sale in Lawrence won’t work for Studio 804 projects. Rockhill said many properties on the market are either demolition sites, which means he might have to wait for permits to tear an existing building down, or sites that would require a review by the city’s Historic Resources Commission. Either one could throw off the delicate timeline of the class’ work, he said.

“The historic aspects that would have to be reviewed by the Historic Resources Commission I would want to avoid, simply because what we do is modern and it would conflict with their interests of preservation,” he said. “While I don’t dismiss the value of it, I can’t compromise the students’ education.”

While he’s looking for the next project site, the students will be embarking on their careers. But they won’t be alone, because Studio 804 doesn’t just build homes — it builds relationships, too.

Aboud said that even in the most difficult and divisive parts of the planning process, getting the work done “comes down to trusting our peers.” She said they met alumni of the Studio 804 program throughout the year, too, and that there’s an instant connection, because those who took the class a decade ago still know how hard the students work.

“That connection is always there,” Aboud said.

Rockhill said he loved working with this year’s Studio 804 team, and that he knows they have a bright future ahead.

“This group stayed together,” he said. “They could joke, but they could also work hard, and they had to.”

He said it’s always satisfying to see how the students grow throughout the process.

At the start, he said, they’re having fun with the novelty of it: “they have the new Carhartts, you know, Timberline boots, you know, sending texts to their buddies.”

But eventually, they have to buckle down and adjust to the schedule and the workload to get the project done.

“We got a little work to do, you know,” he said. “But they’re very cute, and they eventually figure it out, and that’s how we get through it.”

photo by: Contributed

Students Brennen Berrands, left, and Erin McMahan apply sheets of aluminum to the exterior siding at the Studio 804 house at 1040 New York St.