Racine, Wisconsin:
This industrial city on the western edge of Lake Michigan has miles of shoreline, but no one would confuse it with East Hampton. When Vera Scekic and Robert Osborne filed plans for a new house here with construction costs estimated at $476,000, it was the largest residential application in years, said Rick Heller, the city's chief building inspector. New houses in Racine, he added, are mostly built by Habitat for Humanity and other charities.
Indeed, for some in this city 30 miles south of Milwaukee, the arrival of a new house, built from the ground up by local contractors, is reason to rejoice. Jane Cascio, an artist who lives nearby, said she drives past the house every day just to admire it. "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," she said.
But to others, the recently finished house is cause for consternation. With its modern exterior -- the exposed steel beams and concrete walls, the expanses of glass offering views through the home onto Lake Michigan -- it stands out in a neighborhood of Tudor, Georgian and colonial-style houses.
"I call it the ice cube. It doesn't fit at all," one resident wrote in the comments section of the local newspaper after it reported on the house.
The owners' response? This neighborhood of historic homes has developed over time, and there is no reason it should not continue to evolve. "In 50 years," Ms. Scekic said, "this may be considered a historic house."
Brian Johnsen and Sebastian Schmaling, of Johnsen Schmaling Architects, the small Milwaukee firm that designed the house, point to one of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpieces, the SC Johnson Administration Building, 10 blocks away. "We were prepared, if there was opposition, to show that Racine has an architectural history," Mr. Johnsen said. "And it's not a history of mediocrity."
Ms. Scekic, 43, and Mr. Osborne, 45, moved here from Evanston, Ill., with their 10-year-old twin daughters, Sofia and Jasmina, to be closer to Ms. Scekic's mother, Bosa. An artist who grew up in Racine, Ms. Scekic now has a studio downtown; Mr. Osborne, a software developer, is commuting from Chicago until they sell their house there.
Ms. Scekic said she likes that the colors of the window frames -- olive, orange, yellow -- mimic those of her abstract paintings, several of which hang in the all-white living room. "We wanted a house with some levity," she said.
And plenty of light.
"When you're in the house, it clears your mind," she said. "It's white and bright, a cleansing kind of light."
But it is also a house with a serious point to make.
Climate control is achieved by a geothermal system that relies on the fact that, 200 feet below the surface, the soil stays at 55 degrees; antifreeze pumped through the walls heats or cools the house. There are two photovoltaic arrays (one on the roof, another in the backyard) that produce electricity on sunny days, and a separate system that provides solar hot water.
The house is only the second in Wisconsin to receive a LEED platinum rating. LEED standards sometimes reward large, wasteful houses simply for using green technologies, but here green wasn't an add-on. Mr. Osborne and Ms. Scekic made sure the house stayed compact -- just 1,900 square feet -- by restricting themselves to a single-car garage and a single bathroom on the upstairs level, Mr. Johnsen said. "I can't think of the last time we built a house in which the family shared the bathroom," he said.
The couple were willing to share rooms for the same reason -- family togetherness -- that they moved to Racine in the first place. Ms. Scekic's mother lives nearby in the house where Ms. Scekic was raised, and now helps care for the children. And "as she gets older, we'd like to be closer," Mr. Osborne said.
They initially thought about buying a house, but most of the ones along the lake were too large. They finally found a vacant lot and agreed to buy it for about $500,000. It was more than they would have paid to buy and demolish one of the neighboring houses, they said, but they were willing to meet the price to avoid destroying a usable building.
Next came the search for an architect. They were drawn to Mr. Johnsen and Mr. Schmaling in part because their firm is in Milwaukee, where they had gone to architecture school. "The fact that they wanted to stay in an industrial city and make a go of it gave us something in common," Ms. Scekic said.
Some of the house's green features -- like the windows positioned to take advantage of breezes from the lake -- cost nothing, Mr. Osborne said. Others required a sizable investment.
The heating and cooling systems, including the four geothermal wells, for example, cost about $100,000 (an amount reduced somewhat by a federal tax credit and a state rebate). Estimates of how much they will save in fuel costs vary widely, but the lack of reliable information was one reason the couple chose to install them.
"We will track them, and hopefully get some hard data that people can use," Mr. Osborne said.
For the architects, the house was a chance to experiment with using green features in a residential design. From what could have been a boxlike house, they carved away parts of the volume, creating a landscaped two-story courtyard and a pair of outdoor rooms upstairs. The cutouts satisfied the clients' desire for cross-ventilation, while blurring the boundaries between inside and out.
"Even in the winter," Ms. Scekic said, "I don't want to feel like I'm stuck indoors."
The multilayered facades serve an environmental purpose as well: sheets of CBF, a concrete board, are hung eight inches from the building enclosure, which is made of oriented strandboard and a VaproShield breathable membrane. That allows the facade to ventilate itself, limiting heat buildup in the summer.
Of course, installing the green features complicated the building process, Mr. Osborne said. Using a geothermal system, for example, required the well-digger, the heating and cooling specialist and the plumber to work together.
For that reason and others, construction took time. But the house was eventually built according to the architects' -- and LEED's -- high standards.
Among other things, LEED protocol required that the house be evaluated for air tightness. An inspector trained a blower on the facade and gauged how much air passed through it.
The house got a very high score. According to Mr. Osborne, the tester said, "If it were any tighter, when you open the doors, the toilets would flush."
Mr. Osborne likes repeating that line, and not only because it's funny. After a year of design and two years of construction, he said, "It's comforting to know that it was built right."