On our way home from Garden City last week, Lisa and I made a detour so I could see the rebuilt town of Greensburg. I’d read online about these amazing LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified buildings that had been built to demonstrate the community’s commitment to coming back from the May 2007 tornado in a green, sustainable way, and I wanted to see them for myself.

Convention and Tourism Director Stacy Barnes accommodated our last-minute request for a visit, and gave us a hard-hat tour of the new Big Well Museum and Visitor’s Center, which is scheduled to open Memorial Day weekend. This museum will serve as a tourism hub, providing information about the town’s history, the reconstruction of the community, and the Big Well itself.

Visitors will be able to travel down its spiral staircases deep into the well, and then climb up above the well to get a bird’s-eye view of the rebuilt community and the well’s depths. (On a side note, the museum is being built by McCownGordon Construction, the same company building the Flint Hills Discovery Center in Manhattan.)

We also stopped to see the 5.4.7 Arts Center (named after the date the EF5 Tornado devastated the town), which was the first public building rebuilt after the storm. University of Kansas graduate students in architecture built the structure in 2008 in Lawrence and transported it to the site in Greensburg. It was the first building in Kansas to receive a LEED Platinum rating. Now it provides a home for exhibits, performances and classes, and it is the only public arts center between Wichita and Dodge City.

While we didn’t tour the Kiowa County Commons (home to the library, K-State Extension, a community media center and county museum) or the Kiowa Public Schools building (home to grades K-12 in a unique zigzag layout that keeps different age groups separated), both buildings looked fascinating in design and function.

If you are interested in LEED architecture, the impact of weather, or Kansas history and tourism, be sure you put Greensburg on your list of places to stop and see this year!

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