91ÊÓƵ

Kinetic energy is building in the South Waterfront District.

On Wednesday, ZRZ Realty – the real estate arm of Zidell Cos. – gave media members a tour of its new, 118-unit apartment complex on Southwest Moody Avenue. The Emery is the first building to rise from the 33-acre Zidell Yards, as well as the first private development completed in the South Waterfront since the recession.

But also on Wednesday, TriMet reopened Southwest Moody Avenue, revealing a widened road with new light-rail tracks, bikeways and bio-swales. A stone’s throw away, the nearly 500,000-square-foot Collaborative Life Sciences Building remains under construction. Approximately 3,400 students, employees and patients are expected to populate the area soon.

“The people going back and forth between that building and the tram is going to be five to six times what it is today,” said Dennis Allen, ZRZ Realty’s director of planning and development, pointing to the Collaborative Life Sciences Building.

On the tour, Allen was joined by Project Ecological Development Partner Tom Cody, and ZGF Architects‘ Nat Slayton.

ZRZ Realty’s new building, named for chief visionary Emery Zidell, blends history, industry and architecture. It features a naturally rusting metal facade, exterior walls that cantilever like a ship’s prow, wood floors, and safety yellow hallways that invoke images of the manufacturer’s past and present – the product of extensive research and brainstorming.

“The building itself was really born through that research, and is really more relevant than anything else down here,” Cody said during the tour.

A major challenge for the approximately $20 million project was simply figuring out how to fit the building on the site. Wedged between a hill, the Ross Island Bridge and one of TriMet’s transformer stations, a simple rectangle wouldn’t have worked. The end product is more trapezoidal and compelling as a result. It also features substantial window space and natural light – not only in central spaces, but also in bedrooms’ ceiling corners.

Another unique aspect is its structural makeup of five wood floors over a two-story cement podium. Slayton said city codes typically permit only one story of cement for a five-over-one ratio, but because of the building’s location on a hill, the ground floor was technically considered a basement, and so the team was able to squeeze in another income-producing floor.

“Not only does it pencil out, but we think it makes a better urban gesture,” Slayton said.

The building also features a large ground-floor lobby with custom furniture created by FIELDWORK Design & Architecture. One unique detail is a wooden topographical map of sorts of the Willamette River that FIELDWORK designed for the lobby’s north wall.

The Emery is already 20 percent leased. Allen said 50 percent of the tenants are connected to Oregon Health & Science University; many do not own cars. Project Ecological Development has signed Lovejoy Bakers, based in the Pearl District, to open a second location in one of the ground-floor retail spaces; the firm is actively working to fill up the others.

A year ago, the developers could only dream about attracting such a tenant to their new building. Now, Cody said it shouldn’t be long before The Emery starts to feel like home.

“In a building like this today, you really want the ground-floor retail to be an extension of the living room,” he said.

ZRZ Realty is working on feasibility studies to identify its next project at Zidell Yards.