The greening of Greensburg continues this week on TV

Eight months passed since I last set foot in Greensburg, the western Kansas town wiped out by an EF-5 tornado. I was eager to see how its ambitious plan to rebuild as a environmentally "green town" was coming along. Some of you saw it chronicled on TV, notably the cable series "Greensburg."

Well, what better way to find out than with a busload of U.S. Green Building Council members? So I hitched a ride on a sustainable building tour to Greensburg late last month. We saw the John Deere and GM dealerships, the business incubator and the site of the new school campus -- all of which are looking to achieve some of the highest ratings from the USGBC for energy-saving design.

Here's the first video:

The grand finale was a stop at the first major building to be completed in Greensburg, and the first structure in the entire state of Kansas to receive the USGBC's highest sustainability rating, LEED Platinum.

That building, the 5.4.7 Arts Center, is featured in "Build It Bigger: Rebuilding Greensburg" on the Science Channel beginning next weekend. Two episodes air 8 p.m. Saturday on Science Channel, which is the new home for the long-running "Build It Bigger" series, hosted by architect Danny Forster, after six seasons on sister channel Discovery.

In fact, Science is the fourth channel owned by Discovery to televise some aspect of the rebirth of Greensburg after the unprecedented May 4, 2007, storm that destroyed 95 percent of the town's homes, businesses and churches. In the months that followed, Greensburg gathered even more interest as local leaders, notably its city administrator Steve Hewitt, committed to turning this conservative farm community into a nationwide model city of green design.

In late 2007, a group of 22 architecture students at the University of Kansas, led by professor Dan Rockhill, decided they wanted to design and build a project in Greensburg. The students were enrolled in Studio 804, a nationally recognized program that is considered a pioneer in "design-build," an integrated approach to building construction. (As you may recall from this summer's Sundance Channel series "Architecture School," design-build aims to knock down the proverbial wall of sheetrock that has long separated the roles of architects and contractors.)

"Build It Bigger" followed Studio 804 every step of the way, and no wonder. The students had set for themselves a ridiculous pair of goals practically tailor-made for a TV reality show. First, they were determined to achieve LEED Platinum certification for their building, which as Forster noted, "no professional architect (in Kansas) has yet to achieve, let alone a group of students." And they decided they had to finish the job in time for the city's one-year commemoration the tornado -- that meant doing the project, start to finish, in six months.

As we see in the program, Rockhill's students were usually way too busy designing and building (often at the same time) to notice high they'd set the bar. LEED Platinum is basically a complicated technical scorecard that applies scores of sustainability criteria to every major phase of the project. We're talking points for everything from dual-flush toilets and square footage (smaller is greener) to passive solar, rainwater collection, wind power, even the type of grass planted outside.

And the crazy part, as my busmates explained to me, is that most changes to the building's design will both add to and subtract from your LEED point total.

"Build It Bigger" uses computer animation to illustrate some of the features of the Studio 804 project. And if you've read this far, you're probably not going to mind a minor spoiler: They did finish the job, they did achieve Platinum and the building really is first-rate.

The students came up with some neat design tricks, like skylights that open and allow hot air to escape, yet close automatically when rooftop sensors detect rain. The glass wall of the building's south side maximizes the sun's light and heat during the winter months.

Other energy savers aren't that sexy. The super-dense cellulose insulation is just like the kind we had packed into our 100-year-old house recently. And the building's modest footprint, just 1,000 square feet, means less energy is needed to heat and cool it.

What the program doesn't tell you is that the 5.4.7 Arts Center is not paid for -- not by a long shot. John Janssen, the former mayor of Greensburg, recently grumbled to the Kiowa County Signal about "this glass house" that "sucked up $500,000 in resources that could've been used elsewhere."

His successor, Bob Dixson, feels differently, and not just because his daughter is Stacy Barnes, director of the arts center. Dixson gave up most of a Saturday afternoon to accompany us on our tour, helping to point out green details in the buildings we visited.

As we stood in the unfinished business center, Dixson reminded us city slickers that rural Americans were "the original recyclers," who had long used the sun, wind and rain to their benefit. Those who were rebuilding Greensburg, he said, were simply reclaiming that tradition to create a new future for themselves and their children.

Dixson exudes a gentle, stubborn optimism that complements his city administrator's more technocratic style, though they and others we met all seem extremely determined to put their town back on the map. (About 750 people have returned to Greensburg, down from the 1,400 who lived there pre-storm.)

The city still needs to find $350,000 to pay for 5.4.7 Arts Center. In the redevelopment parlance of Greensburg, this deficit is known as a "gap." I asked Dixson about it. He looked me square in the eye and said, "The gap will be met." He looked at me for a moment, then added, "That's it."