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Portland Community College to be busy with construction this summer

By: Lindsey O'Brien//April 6, 2012//

Portland Community College to be busy with construction this summer

Lindsey O'Brien//April 6, 2012//

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About 120,000 square feet of the College Center building at Portland Community College's Sylvania campus will be renovated using money from the school's share of a district-wide construction bond. (Photo by Sam Tenney/91视频)

is in the midst of a massive facelift for its , which sprawls across 122 acres between Tigard and Lake Oswego.

Enrollment at Sylvania has jumped 38 percent since 2008, making every square foot of existing space a commodity. Thanks to a district-wide construction bond, the campus is receiving approximately $52 million to renovate nearly every building on the campus. But the construction work will displace students and faculty already fighting for space in the existing buildings.

鈥淲e’re pretty much at capacity,鈥 said Jeff Triplett, dean of instruction for the Sylvania campus. 鈥淲e’re just bursting at the seams, and the majority of the academic buildings will be touched by construction in some fashion.鈥

and general contractor won the contracts for the campus-wide work. The two firms are finalizing plans to begin several projects this summer that will create some much-needed swing space on the campus.

鈥淚t’s a little bit messy, but it’s one of those very unique and really interconnected projects where one move is required to make another move,鈥 said Kyle Andersen, principal at GBD.

GBD is finalizing plans for a 2,000-square-foot building that will spend most of its life as an automotive storage building. But first it will provide classroom and office space for displaced departments.

As an occupied space, the building will require insulation and mechanical systems that would not normally be installed in a storage facility. So the challenge for the architects is to create a simple building that provides enough thermal comfort to keep people happy, yet is both cost effective and durable enough to withstand future storage of heavy machinery.

鈥淭he creation of the swing space wasn’t completely contemplated when the work started,鈥 Anderson said, 鈥渟o we’ve really had to dig in deep and look for opportunities to create space that we can move departments through as we’re renovating鈥

When the building is finished by the end of this year, it will likely serve as swing space through at least 2015, according to PCC project manager Gary Sutton.

鈥淥ur big focus right now is to make sure we create space that will keep the college operational while we do construction,鈥 Sutton said. 鈥淚t is a challenge, but it’s also the nature of the beast.鈥

Crews also will start also start renovation work this summer on the campus library, swimming pool, and science building. The total of the summer projects amounts to about $7.8 million, according to the bond’s public involvement program manager, Gina Whitehill-Baziuk.

The biggest puzzle piece in the Sylvania modernization project will be coordinating the renovation of the College Center building, which houses student service offices, two coffee shops, the dining hall, the Women’s Resource Center, the Multicultural Center, and departmental offices. Crews will work on nearly 75 percent of the building, or about 120,000 square feet, the coordination of which Andersen likens to solving a Rubik’s Cube.

The College Center project likely will be done in four phases over two years, starting in the fall. The concrete structure, which is in line with the rest of the rationalist architecture of the campus, will not look much different from the outside, but most of the departments working within the building must be moved at least once, sometimes twice, to accommodate the interior work.

GBD also has begun work on the conceptual design for a 10,000-square-foot child development center, which is expected to start construction in 2013.

鈥淚t’ll be tricky to piece everything together, but we’ll figure it out,鈥 Sutton said.



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