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When architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed its renovation of the 511 Federal Building in 1966, it unwittingly did the historic structure a huge favor.

“The beauty of the renovation in the ’60s is they covered up and they didn’t rip out,” said Deniz Conger, senior director of philanthropy for the Pacific Northwest College of Art. “So, underneath this floor and underneath this carpeting is gorgeous maple wood flooring that will be refinished.”

Other treasures lay buried in the building that opened in 1919. Massive arched windows are capped by acoustical ceilings; decorative wooden archways are plastered with drywall; and terra-cotta tile floors sit beneath dusty, orange carpets – all features made to accommodate government use when the U.S. Postal Service vacated the building nearly 50 years ago.

Conger led a small tour through the building before it is transformed into the PNCA’s new campus headquarters. The renovation is expected to cost $32 million.

The Portland Development Commission recently agreed to acquire the property and lease it to the PNCA for $1 a year for 99 years. The school is paying for the renovation via a complex, $20.32 million loan from the PDC, $6 million in proceeds from the sale of its existing Pearl District building, more than $10 million from private fundraising and millions of dollars more from tax credits.

Demolition is scheduled to begin Dec. 2.

“I would not be a good developer if I did not get nervous,” said Jill Sherman, a vice president at Gerding Edlen, the project’s development consultant. “We’re definitely going to find things that we didn’t expect and that we’ll have to address. A historic renovation has more risk associated with it than new construction in that respect.”

That is why Gerding Edlen and the project’s general contractor, Howard S. Wright, have built contingencies into their budgets. Chris Bixby, a senior associate at Allied Works Architecture, the project’s architect, said his team has combed through a hundred years worth of drawings to try and anticipate unknowns.

Allied Works has designed numerous artistic institutions around the country, but is perhaps best known locally for its design of the Wieden+Kennedy building. That project created a contemporary office by showcasing a 100-year-old warehouse’s historic attributes, and the renovation of the 511 Federal Building will be no different.

“I wouldn’t say it’s trying to meld (the new with the old),” Bixby said. “We’re really trying more to differentiate it from the old so there’s no confusion. It’s one of the premises of doing a historic renovation – you don’t want to blur the distinction between what was original and what’s new.”

To that end, the renovation will peel back the layers that made the interior dark and constrictive, and open the original skeleton to natural light. Crews will modify several key spaces – most prominently the grand corridor that cuts through the building from the North Park Blocks to Northwest Broadway.

Much of the hallway – featuring checkered marble floors and an intricately painted (including dragons, cherubs and flowers) vaulted ceiling – will be preserved; however, its walls will be torn out so that the space spills into other light-filled and voluminous areas. There will be a new library, an objects studio, a black box theater, an art gallery and a glass-roofed grand central atrium, which the fifth floor will look upon through open walls. With 20-foot ceiling heights throughout the first floor, Allied Works is also introducing a concrete mezzanine with a cable suspension system that runs around the perimeter of each room.

As for the studios upstairs, Gus Baum, director of institutional research and planning for the PNCA, said the plan is to keep the space simple and moldable.

“Really, what we’re attempting to accomplish with the design of the interiors is spaces for collaboration to occur on the student level, the faculty level and the community level, and for those spaces to be transformed over time to mirror and reflect and adapt and support the variety of types of making that will exist now and in the future,” Baum said.

The block in front of the building is also slated to become a new park block, and many observers hope the 511 Federal Building’s renovation will be a catalyst for growth between the Pearl District (on its west side) and Old Town Chinatown (on its east). Gerding Edlen is already making a bid for a nearby piece of property next to the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. The PNCA also recently opened a new $7 million dormitory on the North Park Blocks, a few blocks south of the 511 Federal Building.

The building isn’t slated to open until the 2014-2015 academic year, but PNCA President Tom Manley has no trouble picturing the future.

“It’s honestly not hard to believe,” he said. “We’ve practiced believing over the last five years, so we’ve gotten good at it.”