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When Viewpoint Construction Software’s top executives heard Portland General Electric was considering plans to demolish the Hawthorne Building on Water Avenue three years ago, they took note.

Viewpoint CEO Jay Haladay and Jeff Reaves, the company’s director of global real estate, saw a business opportunity. Take the empty shell of an historic building and transform it into a creative industrial office space for a company in expansion mode.

For Viewpoint, which plans to move about 150 employees into the building by November, the building will fit the kind of environment that the company’s “knowledge” workers desire, he said.

“There’s a growing awareness that there’s a connection between the facilities an organization uses and who and what they are,” Haladay said. “My feeling is that we are the industries of the new century, not the industries of the 1800s. That helps us make the decisions of what kind of facilities we use.”

The 1909-built building, which is being called the 1510 Technology Center, had significant levels of contamination from decades of use as a maintenance and machine shop for PGE.

“Jay, myself, and other developers went to PGE and said, ‘Don’t tear this down because it does have value,'” said Reaves, a former architect and manager at then-Group Mackenzie. The firm, which now goes by the name Mackenzie, designed the renovation project.

The two-story, 60,000-square-foot building is located across the street from Viewpoint’s global headquarters at the RiverEast Center just south of the Hawthorne Bridge. Viewpoint, moved to the Central Eastside District in 2005, when the company was called Coaxis.

The building had just the right amount of grit, history and unique elements to be an ideal location for Viewpoint’s expansion plans. Some elements include vast concrete floorings, prominent cement columns and significant window space that bring light into both floors of the building, Haladay said.

“We’re getting a shell of a building,” Haladay said. “It has unique industrial looks to it, but it doesn’t have any software components.”

PGE listened to the calls for preserving the building, eventually agreeing to sell the building to Vancouver, Wash.-based developer Killian Pacific. As part of the sale, PGE agreed to voluntarily clean up the contaminants, according to documents filed with the Oregon Public Utility Commission.

Highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were widely used as a coolant in transformers, were spilled on the floors over the years, according to the PUC.

“PGE has been very upfront and cooperative throughout this whole process,” Haladay said. “Everybody recognized that it had some environmental challenges.”

PGE’s decontamination work is nearly finished on the building, which has been vacant a year. Its contractor, Missoula, Mt.-based Envirocon Inc., has removed the top two inches of the concrete slab, said Adam Tyler, design and development manager for Killian Pacific.

The scope of work for Killian’s general contractor, Camas, Wash.-based Robertson & Olson Construction Inc., includes installing hydronic piping through the building’s all-concrete floors, which will be used for radiant heating and cooling from the slab, Tyler said. Robertson & Olson also will install new mechanical, electrical and plumbing fixtures in the building; replace an old gabled roof; and install new windows that retain the historic look of the old ones.

Old growth Douglas fir lumber will be salvaged from the rooftop and reused as part of the interior design elements, including ceilings, walls and finishes, Tyler said.

“We love it because of the open space and the exposed concrete,” he said. “(Viewpoint) likes the authentic character of the space and the columns. The ratio of window to walls is phenomenal.”

The developer will seek platinum LEED certification on the project, which will cost $4.5 million, according to building permits. Once completed, Viewpoint will lease the building from Killian Pacific.

“The biggest challenge of the project is timing and environmental issues,” Tyler said. “PGE stepped up in a big way. They didn’t want to demolish the building. This will probably be the cleanest building in the Central Eastside when it is done.”

The central two floors of the 1510 Technology Center also will have a free and open design, similar to the Viewpoint headquarters offices at RiverEast. The design will cater to a mix of creative types with collaborative spaces, including special workspaces called agile scrum rooms that create cohesion; a space for games such as Wii, shuffleboard, and billiards; and WebEx conferencing rooms. Each of the two floors will have room for about 100 work spaces, giving the building the ability to expand as the company moves ahead with plans to increase Portland staff from 250 to 500 by the end of 2015, Haladay said.

The basement of the building, which PGE once used for deliveries from horse and buggy, will have abundant bike storage, an employee lounge and showers.

As part of the renovation, Killian Pacific also will install wiring and plumbing needed for leasing space to at least two food carts, which would be parked out front of the building.

Public transportation options also will be abundant. The building will be easily accessible by bus, streetcar and light rail by the time the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Bridge is completed by September of next year, Reaves said.