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Construction is under way on Pearl West, a nine-story, 154,000-square-foot office tower at the corner of Northwest 14th Avenue and Irving Street. The building is designed to have a look befitting the Pearl District‘s industrial past.

Future tenants will be able to occupy either a more traditional office space with enclosed fixtures or one with a more exposed look, said Phil Beyl, principal and president of GBD Architects, which teamed up with THA Architecture to design the $31 million tower.

In order to have this flexibility, the design-build team of GBD and Howard S. Wright, a Balfour Beatty Co. will use a post-concrete shell system instead of a more traditional steel one. The cement structure will let tenants choose either exposed ceilings or hanging ceiling tile when they make tenant improvements, Beyl said.

“People love to see the bones of the building,” he said. “We expect to get a fair number of tenants in the creative class and we also expect a law office or two. It will be flexible for a wide range of tenant uses.”

The project’s developer, BPM Real Estate Group, is hoping to attract a restaurant tenant for the 10,000-square-foot space on the ground floor, Beyl said.

The building will have underground parking and a shared public plaza fronting Northwest Irving Street.

The tower should be completed by February 2016, Beyl said.