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Like any renovation of a historic building, the $33 million project to update the 511 Federal Building for the Pacific Northwest College of Art has been a creative leap of faith.

After several months of demolition work, the project team is starting to see formerly hidden portions of the 95-year-old building come into view, said Chris Bixby, associate principal of Allied Works Architecture, which designed the renovation on Portland’s North Park Blocks.

“One of the primary actions we’re taking with this building is to remove the layers of history that blocked the natural light that originally illuminated the work space,” he said. “What we’re really doing is peeling those layers away and bringing the natural light back into the building.”

That involved redesign of the building’s north end to become a more connected, communal space. The north end previously served a variety of uses, including mail sorting for the U.S. Postal Service to daytime detention for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

Crews are now completing form work and pouring slabs for the new mezzanine that will help define four major public spaces on the ground floor – a library reading room, an atrium, a multiuse space and an object study library. The mezzanine will be supported by thin cables.

“It was the major move we did to the building,” Bixby said. “The rest of the project is about editing out 60 years of bad renovation work.”

For PNCA President Tom Manley, the project will stand out because contemporary architecture and a historic building are being fused.

“The way the (renovation) was designed was to create unity in (a) building in a way that respected the historic architecture,” Manley said. “I think they did a fantastic job.”

Many unknowns were uncovered, said Doug Greenwalt, senior project manager for Howard S. Wright, the project’s general contractor.

Most of those surprises have come from a demolition process to restore some of the building’s original look and open large, functional spaces that had been buried by two previous renovations. Workers had covered transom windows and north-facing sawtooth skylights, which were common in industrial buildings and now are highly coveted by studio artists.

Additionally, marble-paneled walls and terrazzo-style flooring were revealed in the Grand Corridor and each of the six floors in the tower. They were hidden for years by old plaster and orange carpeting removed during demolition.

Howard S. Wright had performed a similar job at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall, so it knew what it was getting into with the PNCA project, Greenwalt said.

“We put hours and hours into cleaning this up,” he said. “It was pretty hammered when we got it.”

Wading into the unknown meant creating various mock-ups for building elements including classroom spaces, windows, doors and the air conditioning system. A new HVAC system will be installed to improve energy performance.

Also, a new viscous damper system will provide greater seismic strength. Only a few structures in Portland feature viscous dampers, which are chevron-shaped devices that absorb the shock of an earthquake rather than resist it. The dampers had to be purchased 40 weeks in advance; they will be delivered in August.

Installation of the system will require precision at a micron level, Greenwalt said. Using Building Information Modeling will allow Howard S. Wright to test exactly what the system will look like and ensure that pins fit perfectly through the holes, he said.

“The tolerances are very small for each damper,” he said.

The contractor also created a 3-D model using BIM to ensure that all mechanical and electrical elements would not clash with the original structure, Greenwalt said.

“We need to keep the duct work as tight as possible,” he said. “It’s nice to have clash detection because we want to be certain at installation time.”

Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design

Location: 511 N.W. Broadway, Portland

Cost: $33 million

Construction start date:ÌýJanuary 2014

Anticipated construction completion date:ÌýJanuary 2015

Owner:ÌýPacific Northwest College of Art

Developer:ÌýGerding Edlen

Architect:ÌýAllied Works Architecture

Engineer:ÌýKPFF Consulting Engineers

General contractor:ÌýHoward S. Wright