With average home prices in Vancouver stretching past the $460,000 mark this year, the need for more deeply affordable housing in Clark County and Southwest Washington continues to grow unabated.

While market pressures still favor the construction of large single-family homes, a growing number of multifamily affordable housing projects are also being developed in Vancouver. One of the larger projects in this category in recent years is the 69-unit being developed by Mercy Housing Northwest. The six-building development was designed by Vancouver-based MWA Architects and is being built by general contractor Walsh Construction. Funding for the $22.2 million project is being provided by a variety of sources, including the City of Vancouver’s Affordable Housing Fund, PeaceHealth, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and private investors.

“PeaceHealth donated capital for the construction and they also donated 2 acres of land for the project,” said Alisa Huber, a senior project developer with Mercy Housing NW. “They are highly committed to the mission and highly committed to the community and to positive outcomes. Mercy organized the other financing resources and the development team and planned the project.”

It’s taken a while to get to this point. Talks to build the project began between Mercy Housing and PeaceHealth in 2016 and originally centered around a different property north of the PeaceHealth campus off Mill Plain Boulevard. The current project broke ground last July on 2 acres on NE 93^rd Avenue, with that street bisecting the development north to south. Completion is expected by August 2022.

“We went through a number of designs and the goal was to work with the local community and with PeaceHealth to develop something that was really a match for the neighborhood,” Huber said. “We started out with a denser design on a different parcel north of the hospital, but it evolved that this was a better match for what we were looking for.”

The six buildings are all three-story wood framed structures. Building A on the east side of the street is the largest of them and features a 7,500-square-foot footprint. It will house a community multipurpose room with a kitchen that will not only host tenant gatherings but also be used for classes on financial literacy and other subjects. It will also host visits by health care providers and other services, many of which will be offered by PeaceHealth.

“It’s a partnership aimed at affirmative health outcomes by focusing on the social determinants of health, things like housing stability, education and health care access, social connectedness,” said Colin Morgan-Cross, director of Real Estate Development for Mercy Housing Northwest. “All of these things are emphasized in Mercy Housing’s approach to housing and to resident services.”

The three-story structures are all rectangular in shape and provide little in the way of construction challenges, said Walsh Superintendent Pete Bruns. Where the difficulties have come, however, are largely the same as virtually every project going over the past two years: supply and material issues.

“The building itself is no challenge,” Bruns said. “The challenge was being able to procure product and materials for framing, like everyone who is having the same issues. That’s the biggest challenge for this project. I-joists are tough for flooring; the manufacturer only let out so many per project a month because that’s all they could handle.”

Other products in short supply include things like certain types of plastic pipe for plumbing; the popular Hardie plank siding, which is being removed from the company’s commercial offerings going forward; and numerous electrical components, including transformers.

“Hardie is going away,” said Walsh Project Manager Erik Wahrgren. “We got the last stick they made; and then our transformers we ordered in June last year, we won’t get them until March, so that was a challenge. But other than that, as far as the structure goes, it’s a friendly development.”

Like Mercy Housing Northwest and PeaceHealth, which share a common founder in the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, Mercy Housing and Walsh Construction have a long and productive history together.

“Walsh has been a very reliable partner for us,” Huber said, noting that Mercy and Walsh will also break ground on the Marylhurst Commons project in Lake Oswego in July. “We have probably developed around 700 units of housing with Walsh in the last eight years.”

All of that work has previous been done in the Seattle market, however. The Mercy-Peach Health Family Housing and Marylhurst Commons projects are the firm’s first forays into the Portland area.

One hundred percent of the units at Mercy-PeaceHealth Family Housing will be affordable to families who earn less than 60 percent of the area median income, and half of the total units will be affordable to families who earn less than 30 percent.

“It’s a highly affordable project and it’s designed for families,” Huber said, noting that 31 of the 69 units will have two bedrooms and 15 of them will have three bedrooms.

“We have a long history of success with Walsh Construction and really appreciate that shared partnership over time,” Morgan-Cross said.

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Fewer developable properties remain in Portland’s Pearl District than can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

One of the last sizable projects under way there is at the corner of Northwest 13th Avenue and Quimby Street. Crews are making rapid vertical progression on the 16-story Holden of Pearl, a 237-unit senior living facility designed by Ankrom Moisan Architects for Alliance Residential. Ground was broken in March, and general contractor Walsh Construction is expected to finish in August 2023.

Holden of Pearl tenants will have access to a huge range of amenities as they age in place.

“There’s going to be a lot of green space and courtyard space so that residents can play at chess tables; there’s even going to be a giant chessboard,” said Laura Waddick, a Walsh Construction project engineer. “There are barbecues, water features. There’s a double-sided fireplace on the first floor. It’s going to be a good spot for people to come and visit their grandparents.”

The building will have 16 stories of post-tensioned concrete and a single level of below-grade, tandem parking. A three-story podium will support a narrower tower with the bulk of the residential units – including luxury penthouse units at the top.

The building’s ground floor will have a double-height, arched entryway off of 13th Avenue. Memory care units on that level will serve residents with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. A porte cochere (essentially a circular driveway) off of Quimby Street will be used for valet parking and access to the parking garage.

The second and third levels will feature assisted living units, while the fourth floor will host shared facilities such as a dining area, a yoga studio, a bistro, a nail salon and more. A massive rooftop patio on the fourth level will hold a barbecue area, a dog run and the aforementioned giant chess set. The remainder of the brick-clad building will host studios and one- or two-bedroom apartments.

Because of low soil quality at the site, the engineering team of Kramer Gehlen & Associates and Harper Houf Peterson Righellis chose to employ auger cast piles to shore up the foundation. Pacific Foundations used a massive drill.

“It’s bored out and they pour concrete in and pull the drill out,” Walsh Construction assistant superintendent Abigail Anderson said.

“Our deepest one was 117 feet,” Walsh Construction superintendent Mario Hernandez added.

Other work was required to allow Westech Construction crews to proceed with excavation.

“This is the lowest elevation part of the Pearl District, and we had to do some pretty extensive waterproofing,” Waddick said. “We are in the flood zone, and we had to ‘bathtub’ the entire basement.”

While many Portland project teams have had to deal with radon mitigation, the Holden of Pearl team also had to deal with methane seeping from the ground.

Though no sustainability certifications will be sought for the building, it will have a large eco-roof as well as bird-safe glass on the floors with outdoor amenities. Because birds are unable to see standard transparent glass, bird-safe glass has patterns of dots or stripes.

“It’s basically around all of the courtyard green spaces,” Anderson said. “It’s just around the fourth-floor roof and then there’s a courtyard on first, second and third where the residents can just go out there and have lots of green space, so they put bird-safe (glass) all around that – anywhere where birds land.”

Currently, crews with RDF Builders, Walsh Construction’s carpentry and concrete division, are constructing formwork and piecing together shoring for what will be the fourth-level PT deck. Other crews from Ocean Park Mechanical, Bergelectric and Patriot Fire Protection are installing mechanical, electrical and fire suppression systems, while ironworkers with Timberland Inc. are handling structural steel.

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The Vera is gaining a neighbor.

BRIDGE Housing‘s 203-unit affordable housing structure opened in Portland’s South Waterfront District in June 2020. Now, general contractor Walsh Construction is building for the real estate developer a similar structure at the corner of Southwest River Parkway and Moody Avenue.

RiverPlace Phase II will have 178 apartments – a mix of studios and units with one, two or three bedrooms. The units will be available to residents with incomes up to 60 percent of the area median income.

“We’ve got 50 units of family housing, which is always desirable,” said Nicole Peterson, a BRIDGE Housing senior project manager.

Also, 20 units reserved for veterans will be rented out through Veterans Affairs via project-based vouchers.

The Phase II building will have five stories of wood framing over two levels of post-tensioned concrete. The ground floor will have a mixture of office space, retail space and residential space, while the upper stories will hold apartments and community spaces. A second-level outdoor courtyard will be enclosed on three sides and open to the south, where a Pacific Power facility exists.

“We’re targeted to be done in the fall of next year, and it’s been going pretty well,” Walsh Construction project manager Brian Johnson said. “The biggest limitation being it’s the last block to build in this space. It’s about as tight as it gets. You’ve got the streetcar on two sides, you’ve got The Vera, and then PP&L doesn’t really want us to put stuff in their yard.”

The RiverPlace Phase II building, like The Vera, was designed by Ankrom Moisan Architects. A Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold rating will be sought through the LEED for Homes program. Johnson said the intent is to lean on the energy component to reach that goal. Even without an active photovoltaic array, the efficient building envelope (designed by RDH Building Science) and judicious use of high-quality windows and materials, insulation and brick masonry cladding should allow that to happen.

“How many bike racks you have – OK, that’s helpful,” Johnson said. “But if you really want to talk about the intent of sustainability, figuring out a way to reduce energy usage in buildings is number one. So, you start there.”

The material usage aspect of LEED is “pretty straightforward,” he added.

“We’ve got a lot of great local supply, and wood framing helps us out there,” he said. “And then you get points for the location. Just by virtue of using this site, the transit-oriented development, the amenities, you chalk up a whole bunch of points. It’s a good place to build, and it’s challenging, which is probably the reason it’s the last block to get built here. But it’s compelling.”

Because of site constraints, the building will feature panelized wall systems built by Pacific Wall Systems of Olympia, Washington. Also, motorized scaffolding will be used on all four sides of the building for installation of cladding.

“It would be nice to have a panel company a little closer, but capacity is also an issue,” Johnson said. “There is so much work going on right now, getting a partner is everything. They’ve been taking wood material for two months and have started putting the panels together, so we should see them middle of August.”

Nobody has inventory of almost anything, Johnson added. That has become a fact of life for teams tackling projects of all sizes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s funny in a way because it’s kind of followed the flow of construction,” he said. “For a while there you couldn’t get form ply, you couldn’t get a bunch of wood material, you couldn’t get engineered wood material, you couldn’t get dimensional wood material.”

These days, flooring materials are difficult to procure because the cost of international shipping has tripled in recent months, according to Johnson. Also, there is a dire shortage of paint caused by a lack of polymer compounds normally manufactured in Europe and Asia. Even overhead doors suddenly experienced a 25 percent price increase overnight.

Currently at the RiverPlace Phase II site, carpenters with Whitaker/Ellis are building formwork and preparing to pour the second concrete deck, while mechanical, electrical and plumbing subcontractors Tapani Plumbing, Affordable Electric and American Heating are starting to work on the ground floor.

“We are finding ways around it and that’s where we have to work as a team,” Johnson said. “We have to be open with communication and say here’s what’s available now. And let’s look at options and see if we can be flexible. We certainly knew we would face challenges, but we couldn’t know where.”

The project’s financial partners include: the Portland Housing Bureau, Prosper Portland, Oregon Housing and Community Services, Home Forward, Metro, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, Bank of America and Barings Multifamily Capital.

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The single largest project in the overhaul of Portland International Airport – creation of a new main terminal – is well under way.

But instead of a typical ground-up building process, construction of the most striking and eye-catching portion of that new structure – its roof – is taking place in the northeast corner of the airport property, next to the Port of Portland Fire Department headquarters.

Designed by ZGF Architects to emulate Oregon’s lush forestlands, the mass-timber roof is an ode to the local environment. The undulating structure consists of a skeleton of enormous steel girders fabricated by Evraz in Portland. Those are connected by a series of massive, arching glulam beams made from Douglas fir by Zip-O-Log Mills of Eugene. Topping it off are hundreds of two-inch mass-plywood panels made by Freres Lumber of Lyons.

“It was very important to Port of Portland leadership, so they worked strategically with ZGF on developing the specifications on this prescribed sourcing,” said Katrina Day, a senior project manager with Hoffman Skanska Joint Venture, the project’s general contractor. “It’s intended as a nod to the local community and making sure that we’re reinvesting in Oregon for the project.”

The prefabricated roof is an ingenious solution to some unique construction problems.

First is the building site: a busy international airport that before the pandemic was serving nearly 20 million travelers per year. The sheer volume of people moving though PDX and the importance of the airport as a travel hub means it cannot be shut down for construction – and assembling the roof in place would have required that for safety and security reasons.

“If you stick-built this over the terminal, these members are too big,” Hoffman Skanska senior superintendent Jason Koski said. “You couldn’t build anything like this and have an occupied building. So, by doing these large modules, we’re able to keep the terminal open at all times during construction.”

Instead, the project team took over a 20-acre site next to the near the fire department headquarters and poured a reinforced concrete pad engineered to support the weight of not only the roof structure, but also the massive hydraulic jacks and self-propelled modular transporters that will be used to move the finished roof segments across the airport’s north runway to their eventual home.

“We’ll set those at night in roughly a six-hour window where we can shut the building down,” Koski said.

The full roof will be assembled in spring 2022 from 20 separate pieces. Of those, 16 will be “super modules” featuring arched glulam beams topped with mass-plywood panels fabricated by Freres Lumber and milled into shape by Swinerton subsidiary Timberlab at its Northeast Portland plant. The other four will be smaller “cassettes” to fill in spaces left over.

“Nobody has ever made them to this standard, and nobody has ever made an arched glulam this large,” Day said. “In fact, in the design, they were spliced halfway through because there was no standard for designing to know whether they were constructable. So, Zip-O (employees) took it upon themselves to build a full-size mockup to ensure we could eliminate the splice.”

That effort was successful, and the resulting 80-foot-long beams are up to 9 feet tall.

The wood for the glulams was sourced from local forestlands managed by the Yakama, Coquille and Skokomish tribes as well as other landowners practicing responsible forest management.

“We’re putting our first layer of roofing on,” Koski said. “And we’re putting in all the lighting conduit, the fire alarm conduit, the sprinkler system, the roof drains, and then acoustical panels.”

About 60 percent of the lattice that decorates the interior part of the structure in graceful curves will be installed beforehand, according to Swinerton superintendent Brendan Kelly.

A lot of work was needed in the design and engineering phase to come up with the plan, Port of Portland Construction Services Manager Brad Harrison added.

“We started from scratch, but to stick-build this thing it became apparent that it would almost shut down the airport,” he said. “The contractor was like, the more modular construction you can do, the better, from a whole cost perspective and a safety perspective.”

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The Sullivan’s Ridge Apartments represents a quintessential Portland project for 2021.

Located on Northeast Multnomah Street, just a few blocks from the Lloyd Center mall, the Sullivan’s Ridge Apartments represent the conversion of a former Residence Inn by Marriott into a 168-unit apartment complex spread across 10 separate buildings. It’s the perfect project for an era that has seen the decimation of the region’s hospitality industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while at the same time the surge of new residents calling Portland home has continued unabated.

“This type of conversion is actually pretty new in the marketplace,” said Charles Kidwell, a senior associate with Leeb Architects, the firm responsible for designing the project on behalf of Grand Peaks, a property management firm with six properties in the Portland-metro area and many others across the United States. “But I think it’s a byproduct of the downturn in the hospitality industry and the housing shortage.”

R&H Construction was the general contractor for the project, which received its final occupancy permits toward the end of June.

Built in 1996, the original Residence Inn was comprised of eight separate buildings hosting what were essentially apartments. That fit Marriott’s unique requirements for this brand, which catered to extended-stay travelers and vacationers looking for more than a mere hotel room. It also meant that no reconfiguration of existing floor layouts was required during the renovation of those eight three-story buildings.

Instead, finishes, furniture and interior aesthetic were the focus of the improvements for Leeb and colleagues from Garrison Hullinger Interior Design.

“The main changes were finishes,” Kidwell said. “They stripped out all of the flooring, replaced carpets and tile, and did a lot of repainting. Most of the other work that they did was any repairs that needed to be done, because obviously the apartments had been in use for 25 years.”

The bulk of the renovation work actually focused on a pair of buildings that formerly housed laundry facilities, along with guest amenities and management functions.

The so-called cabana building originally held the laundry equipment for the hotel. These days, it still hosts tenant laundry facilities, but those go alongside a new indoor gym and media room.

The clubhouse building, meanwhile, features the management office for the complex, a large tenant entertainment room with a kitchen, seating and a large fireplace and television. Upstairs, a conference room and another media room are available, while the mail room and maintenance headquarters are found on the ground floor.

“This space is the actual club space for residents,” Kidwell said. “The physical geometry of the space did not change. But all the finishes inside here are new.”

Gone are the old popcorn ceiling finish and worn carpet. In its place are new carpet, new recessed lighting, newly clad exposed beams across the ceiling and a newly finished kitchen space.

“One of the objectives of the clubhouse is as a marketing tool,” he said. “You want to appeal to the tenants who are looking for a more up-to-date place, so you have to get rid of the tired look from the old Residence Inn and make it look fresh. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Doing all this required the project team to go through a nine-month planning and zoning approval process because of the change of use from hospitality to residential. This also triggered new requirements for bicycle parking and ADA accessibility, which meant a plethora of new sidewalks, ramps, over 250 covered bike parking spaces and secure entrances had to be installed.

“From 1996 to now there have been a lot of changes in accessibility requirements,” Kidwell said. “And one of the biggest challenges of the project was getting it through the permitting process.”

Because much of that process was centered around the cabana and clubhouse buildings, it allowed the team to wrap up renovation of the first four residential buildings by February.

Leasing began in April while the rest of the residential units were renovated. The cabana and clubhouse buildings, meanwhile, were given their certificates of occupancy in late June.

Today, roughly half the complex is currently occupied, said Bailey Miller, assistant community manager for Sullivan’s Ridge.

“We’ve been open since April, and we’re already halfway full,” Miller said.

The post FROM HOTEL TO HOT PROPERTY: Leeb, R&H Construction transform former Marriott into apartment complex appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

For various reasons, affordable housing developments typically offer bare-bones accessibility and energy efficiency.

But for a new project in east Multnomah County, Albertina Kerr and Edlen & Company are looking to raise the bar significantly. They are jointly developing the four-story, 150-unit Albertina Kerr Workforce and Inclusive Housing complex on the northwest corner of the nonprofit’s Gresham campus along Northeast 162nd Avenue.

Ankrom Moisan Architects designed the project, which is being funded in part with money from Metro‘s 2018 affordable housing bond as well as affordable housing tax credits.

The development will provide disabled residents with a wide array of features and amenities rarely included in a building of this type. Plus, other features are expected to ensure that energy use in the building is net zero.

“It’s actually not as crazy as you’d think from a financial perspective,” said Jill Sherman, a co-founder of Edlen & Company. “As much as solar costs have come down, we have a ton on the roof, and all of our surface parking has canopies that are covered with solar. You used to have to spend more money on the building and then buy all the solar, and it’s not an insignificant cost addition. But in affordable housing you get tax credits based on eligible project costs, and the cost of getting to net zero is an eligible cost, so the per-unit cost is still very reasonable.”

On top of tax credits, the project also received grant funding from Portland General Electric, Sherman said.

“You get the extra tax credits and no electric utility costs, and we felt the story of a net-zero affordable housing project and the benefits to the environment and tenants would be strong enough to attract additional grant funding, which it has,” she said. “It’s pretty exciting and definitely something that we will continue to look at on our affordable housing projects.”

The project’s general contractor is Pence Construction. Currently, G Builders workers are framing the third story. Completion is expected in spring 2022.

“Once we get the roof secure and dry in the building, then we do the finishes (downward),” Pence Construction foreman Dave Oury said. “We’ll do as much rough-in and build what we can from the bottom up, but when you start to drywall and finish and all that you’ll go from the top floor down.”

Unlike many recent projects in the Portland area, this one has largely avoided the stratospheric cost increases for dimensional lumber and other wood products.

“This bid in September of last year, so that was the first initial spike, and we started procuring some materials after that buy-out before it got too rampant to where we are today,” Pence Construction project manager Chris Mann said. “We have other projects that are really suffering because of that. Luckily, we got our floor joists, and apparently that’s a major, major issue right now. Some projects are being redesigned, but we purchased our material and everyone honored our prices because we were on the front end of the initial increase, so I feel like I’m a lucky person and I should go buy a lottery ticket.”

The Albertina Kerr Workforce and Inclusive Housing complex will include 25 studio apartments, 94 one-bedroom units, 23 two-bedroom units and eight three-bedroom units. Of those, 102 will be affordable for households at 60 percent of area median income (AMI) or less, 11 will be for households at 70 percent AMI or less, and four will be for households at 80 percent AMI or less.

Notably, 30 units will be set aside for residents with an intellectual and/or developmental disability. All of these units will be on the ground floor and feature wider-than-normal doorways, roll-in showers, cabinetry that can be mechanically lowered from walls, blackout curtains, and an array of smart home features able to be controlled by mobile phone apps.

“The main goal is to take somebody who may not feel like they’re totally independent in a typical house or even a typical ADA and give them that independence in these units,” Mann said.

In addition to a 600-kilowatt solar array, the building will have an airtight envelope, high-efficiency mineral wool insulation, triple-paned windows, and a low-energy heat recovery system instead of traditional HVAC units.

“That’s the major difference from typical apartments that this building has,” Mann said. “Then we have water heat pumps on the roof. The equipment is as efficient as you can get.”

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The construction industry has long suffered from a shortage of skilled tradespeople. In response, Portland-metro design and construction firms, as well as nonprofits, are creating workforce development programs that reach out to populations that have largely been overlooked in the past.

Two such efforts are the EmpowHER and Your Street Your Voice programs offered by Camp ELSO, a community-based nonprofit that uses the natural world to connect children from underrepresented communities to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) concepts and disciplines.

EmpowHER and Your Street Your Voice are design studios in which students are asked: ‘If you could change one thing in your neighborhood through design, what would it be?’ Jackie Santa Lucia, a former Hacker associate, is the director of both programs. She recently engaged people from Walsh Construction Co., Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design and a host of local nonprofits (including Girls Build, The City Repair Project and Youth Power PDX) to offer a community-based design and construction workshop. Industry members helped high school students envision, design and construct planter boxes, decorations and a sizable parklet at Alberta Abbey in Northeast Portland.

“It’s just another way to get the community involved and connected to nature,” Lucia said during the workshop, which took place over two weekends in May and early June. “It is holistic workforce development, I would say. I think the biggest part is that it’s community-centered design, community-centered building and leadership.”

The workshop was designed specifically for female and femme, transgender and nonbinary BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) students and community members. They were taught basic carpentry and building skills during the recent event.

“The goal today is that we’re going to finish 18 raised juniper beds, which were all designed by this group of youth here,” said Afton Walsh, community outreach director for Walsh Construction Co. “And there’s the parklet – it’s a 40-foot-long parklet that was also designed by this youth cohort.”

The Alberta Abbey workshop resulted from collaboration with Your Street Your Voice at Walsh Construction’s Dekum Court project, Walsh said, in which 160 new affordable apartments were added to Home Forward‘s existing 40-unit building. There, LEVER Architecture partnered with Your Street Your Voice to incorporate design features like planter boxes, a community garden and more. Walsh Construction project engineer Laura Waddick liked what she saw and proceeded to create a partnership that led to the Alberta Abbey project.

“Laura did all the material procurement,” Walsh said. “She worked with the PSU students to see what was needed, and she’s coordinating with our equipment yard to get Home Depot runs for the roof panels. The logistics, rounding up the volunteers – she did it all. I just showed up.”

The high school student participants in the workshop worked with PSU School of Architecture students to design the parklet as a medicinal and mental health space, said Molly Esteve, design director for The City Repair Project and a PSU instructor.

“They really promoted those two things as a way to build community,” she said. “It’s going to be a classroom as well as an engagement space, and then a public space as well. The gardens will be out front and you’ll be able to use this space for all kinds of things.”

Another unique aspect of the workshop was a donation of juniper lumber by Sustainable Northwest Wood, a for-profit subsidiary of the Sustainable Northwest nonprofit that supports small mills in rural communities. The juniper on hand at Alberta Abbey was sourced from trees planted in eastern Oregon as part of landscape restoration efforts. It’s not normally grown for lumber because of its relatively small size and irregular shape. But juniper has superior rot resistance qualities and attractive grain.

“It’s a little squirrely and has some interesting personality to it,” said Sustainable Northwest Wood sales associate Lynn Morgan, who helped guide students as they worked with the wood. “I did a little bit of coaching, because making something out of it, it’s got a little bowing, a little twisting, lots of character, so we just push them out of the gate a little bit like making sure they pre-drill everything so the wood doesn’t split. I just enjoy the process. It’s fun to see the collaboration and cooperation and just everybody having a good time.”

Liliana Gomez, a student at David Douglas High School in Southeast Portland, took a break from building planter boxes to share how much she was enjoying the sunny afternoon learning about construction. She was encouraged to attend, she said, in part because she has family members who work in the industry.

“Yeah, I am (enjoying it),” she said. “I’m having a lot of fun. My dad, he works in construction. He’s been teaching me how to use tools and everything.”

Esteve noted that it makes sense to ask young people to design park spaces intended for their use.

“This group of youth are so good at seeing things intersectionally and describing them that way and then building off of that,” she said. “We’ve seen them really understand how you’re not talking about one piece when you’re talking about a community; you’re talking about all these different pieces and then how do they fit together into one design scheme. That’s why you’re seeing something that’s really flexible and also really accessible.”

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Swinerton decided a number of years ago that it wanted to be a significant player in the burgeoning mass-timber market.

Since launching Swinerton Mass Timber, the firm has contributed to delivery of a large number of projects featuring cross-laminated timber, mass plywood and other products. Then, in March, as an evolution of Swinerton Mass Timber.

The company’s former equipment rental warehouse in Northeast Portland has become a 23,000-square-foot fabrication facility that includes a custom-made Biesse five-axis computer numerical control (CNC) milling machine capable of handling glued-laminated beams as long as 60 feet.

“We’re a complete design-build firm, doing work nationally on mass-timber structures, and as a subcontractor and vendor to other GCs and owners,” Timberlab President Chris Evans said during a tour of the plant off of Northeast Columbia Boulevard.

In addition to providing design-build timber structures and fully coordinated mass-timber supply packages, Timberlab offers licensed timber engineering and mass-timber product development. The new fabrication facility is where much of that work takes place.

“The whole intent of this Biesse machine is to handle beams that are needed for long-span office buildings and tall timber buildings,” preconstruction manager Erica Spiritos said. “It’s really to eliminate any dimensional constraints that we would otherwise have on CNC machines that are operational in the region, or even in the country, and build capacity to handle the fabrication for the type of members that are needed in the buildings that we are increasingly building.”

While most fabricators of cross-laminated timber or similar products also incorporate CNC milling into their workflow, Timberlab now has the ability to fabricate or mill complicated designs into the rough, manufactured glulam beams and columns that support most mass-timber structures.

“Our whole thing is about being flexible, so part of this was to provide a needed resource within the industry,” business development manager Sam Dicke said. “The glulam manufacturers near us are without secondary fabrication ability to make it into a component. So, this is really about cutting pieces to make those pieces into building components and bring all those glulam manufacturers into the commercial mass-timber market that they might not otherwise be in.”

Much of Timberlab’s efforts are intended to simplify and shorten the time frame of construction on jobsites by focusing on details like connections, sealants and preconstruction work. For example, a new tracking and quality control system uses colored labels with QR codes that identify every unique piece of mass timber for a given project. Each piece corresponds to its counterpart in the project’s 3D model, which allows immediate tracking and improved quality assurance.

Meanwhile, the colored tag affixed to every finished piece of mass timber shows which certification program may have played a role in the procurement process. Timberlab uses FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) certified products, as well as noncertified products.

“This allows our crews in the field to scan this QR code and know exactly where this beam has been and where it needs to go,” Dicke said, “and they can relate it back to the model.”

The Biesse CNC machine is currently being put to use for the massive Terminal Core Redevelopment project (T-Core) at Portland International Airport, as well as another project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, involving glulam beams as long as 50 feet.

The T-Core project is taking up much of Timberlab’s time these days. The shop crew is fabricating 36,000 pieces of FSC-certified Douglas fir lattice supplied by Sustainable Northwest Wood, as well as Freres Lumber mass-plywood panels to frame 18 massive skylights.  These components, paired with nearly 400 80-foot-long glulam arches and a mass plywood roof diaphragm, will comprise the airport terminal’s new ceiling – all sourced from sustainably managed forests and manufactured by mills and laminators in Oregon or Washington.

“It’s 36,000 pieces of 3-by-6 Douglas fir members that all have a different geometry to conform to the undulating roof structure,” Spiritos said. “It’s very precise geometry, so we’re fabricating those pieces and also the mass-plywood skylights.”

It’s a lot of work for a small shop crew, production manager Martin Chabot said.

“There are six of us in the shop, but it’s about to go up dramatically,” he said. “We’re going to start an evening shift to be able to keep up. We’ve been full-on for the last two weeks in here, and obviously the planning for longer than that. But we could be nonstop just focusing on T-Core full time and it would be a year without doing anything else.”

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A very rare rock was found at a construction site in Lake Oswego recently.

Crews performing excavation for the Lakeridge Middle School project turned up an ice age erratic boulder – so named because it was transported on glacial ice broken apart by the massive Missoula floods some 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, according to a local expert.

Jacob Parker, a site superintendent with general contractor Skanska USA Building, spotted the yellowish and greenish boulder – roughly three feet long, two feet wide and two feet thick – and instinctively knew there was something different about it.

“I walked through and examined all of the rocks we unearthed, and this boulder stood out as very unique in color and texture,” Parker said. “I quickly realized it may have some historical or geological significance.”

Parker and the Lake Oswego School District contacted Portland State University geology professor emeritus Scott Burns, who also serves as president of the Tualatin Ice Age Floods Foundation – a nonprofit that seeks to build public knowledge of local geology. Burns visited the jobsite to examine the find.

“I went over and took a look at it and I was very excited,” Burns said. “I said we need to have this because it’s so different and we’ve never seen an erratic like this one.”

After further research, the boulder was found comprised of rhyolite – a volcanic rock rich in silica that is extremely rare in the Cascade Range. Burns surmised that the rock likely arrived in Lake Oswego from Eastern Oregon or even farther away via an ice raft thousands of years ago. That could account for the many boulders that crews discovered at the project site.

“What happened there is they were rebuilding the middle school there and the reports said you will be able to dig down and there will be no boulder bigger than maybe a foot in diameter,” Burns said. “Well, they have boulders they were digging out that were five, six, seven feet across. And they have a huge field of these boulders that they were not expecting.”

Most of the boulders are composed of basaltic lava, which is typically much more fluid and travels much farther from its source than the highly viscous rhyolite.

“This is a major geological find,” Burns said. “Of all of the hundreds of boulders moved to the Willamette Valley by the Missoula floods, this is only the second rhyolite boulder recorded here.”

The event led to an in-person Pacific Northwest geology lesson for students.

“We have a significant real-life learning opportunity for the students here at Lakeridge with this amazing history right under our feet,” Lakeridge Middle School Principal Kurt Schultz said. “Once students graduate from Lakeridge they are freshmen and will study geoscience. So, they’ll have firsthand experience with a piece of historical earth science found right at their school.”

Following a ceremony at the school project site, the rhyolite boulder was donated to the Tualatin Ice Age Floods Foundation and then transported to the Tualatin Heritage Center by Brian Clopton Excavating. The rock is now available for public viewing.

The construction project consisted of demolition of Bryant Elementary School and Lakeridge Junior High School, redevelopment of the site, and construction of a new middle school, sports fields and grounds – all while classes continued on site.

The new 138,325-square-foot school building, completed in fall 2020, consists of a square of interconnected, two-story buildings with a courtyard and a walkway in the center. There is a wood structural shell and decks with steel columns, whole columns fabricated from 29 trees removed from the site, and interior metal studs. The exterior facade consists of fiber cement panels, brick and concrete masonry units.

The school’s courtyard, incidentally, was patterned after the kolks (underwater vortices) that formed during the Missoula floods as water flowed into the Willamette Valley.

“Some of the Native American legends actually talk about floods,” Burns said. “The valley filled up from one side to the other side and everybody had to use their canoes to get away. And maybe that (the Missoula floods) was one of the last ones, because Native Americans were here at that time – 15,000 calendar years ago.”

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As mass timber has gained appeal within the building industry, project teams have largely been addressing challenges as they arise. But the formation of a group of engineering, construction, architecture and fabrication firms could soon change that.

The REACTS (Research on Engineering, Architecture and Construction of Timber Structures) Consortium will begin looking at the most pressing questions about mass timber.

“It’s about a decision-making process to choose work and testing that will help innovate code or eliminate barriers and develop high-performance products,” said Iain Macdonald, director of the Corvallis-based Tallwood Design Institute.

The institute is comprised of members of Oregon State University‘s colleges of engineering and forestry and the University of Oregon‘s college of design. There on the OSU campus the REACTS Consortium will devise new subjects of research and carry out physical experiments at the Emmerson Advanced Wood Products Laboratory, which opened in 2019.

“The cooperative model is not uncommon in universities where you have outside stakeholders who contribute resources so they can get certain types of research done,” Macdonald said. “We’ve always done research that has heavy input from industry; we want research that has impact in the medium term, not blue-sky research necessarily.”

There are 16 firms presently involved in the consortium, which is still in the process of determining which issues it will focus on. More companies could join in the future, but for now the idea is to keep the group small and nimble.

“We’ve been talking in earnest over the last 15 months,” Macdonald said. “We talked with five or six companies in Portland we dealt with often and kicked around the idea to see who would be interested and what would work.”

There’s a three-tier structure under which companies pay different dues to help fund research. Other funding will come from state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service.

“The general philosophy is no matter what level member you are,” Macdonald said, “you have the ability to propose ideas and critique others.”

Ethan Martin, an associate with DCI Engineers of Portland, has been involved with research at OSU for a number of years. The consortium will focus largely on structural issues, including composite design involving mass timber and concrete or other combinations of materials, he said.

“This whole tall mass timber thing kind of came out of the blue for the wood industry,” he said. “It wasn’t a coordinated effort by any means, and now it is.”

Even with 2021 updates to the International Building Code accounting for mass-timber structures, Martin said, “tons of questions” still exist.

“Mass timber is in its infancy,” he said. “The idea behind the Tallwood Design Institute and REACTS is, again, we develop this code language for tall buildings and the framework is there. But the devil is in the details and a lot of the details have not been worked out.”

For Martin and others, however, there is satisfaction in figuring out those details.

“What else needs to be tested?” he asked. “Drift? Composite design? Stuff that is really going to be useful to keep mass-timber buildings rolling.”

Another issue that needs to be fleshed out is mass timber’s acoustic properties, said Graham Montgomery, technical director for Swinerton and its new Portland-based fabrication facility.

“It will definitely benefit what we bring to the table with jurisdictions and help everybody feel more comfortable with things because we’re actually testing these items,” Montgomery said.

Jonathan Heppner, a principal at Lever Architecture, the firm that designed the 12-story Framework mass-timber project that was canceled in 2017, said that one and others since have shown the need for a more coordinated approach within the industry. He likened the effort to a mobile phone, for which a variety of firms are responsible for the hardware, software and network needed to make it functional. Only by working together can the building industry successfully solve the outstanding issues around mass timber, he said.

“We’re just getting started,” Heppner said. “But ideally the consortium as a group can hit what we feel are the most targeted approaches to any of those topics and then maybe break out as groups and work out the research specific to those topics.”

Levi Huffman, technical director at DR Johnson, a Riddle-based fabricator of cross-laminated timber panels, agreed.

“We’ve grown with the market and have a sense there are challenges that we still have to overcome,” he said. “Any barriers, whether a structural design question or acoustics or sustainability for developers – those are items that come up that we need answers to. The thing with the REACTS Consortium is we can quickly identify the hurdles out there that we need to jump over.”

The Tallwood Design Institute, Huffman added, provides potentially costly resources that individual companies don’t have.

“Any time we have barriers that are broken down that make it easier for developers to develop a building, there are going to be more of them built and the demand for mass timber will go up,” he said. “It’s going to help grow the industry, break down barriers and keep this mass-timber movement going forward.”

Just one example of this, Heppner said, came up during the Framework project. The proposal for seismic resilience featured a rocking wall with an entirely exposed wood finish. A brace frame perhaps could have been superior, he said, but using mass timber to construct such elements hadn’t been done before.

“If you had something that was more of a brace frame solution it will have different implications for performance and for the user,” he said. “It’s a technology rather than a solution, and you’re just trying to find the best use of that. You want a lot of potential options to fit it into different scenarios that would come up.”

That kind of experimentation is exactly what the consortium is designed to tackle.

“Some of it really comes down to what will the jurisdiction allow,” Martin said. “That’s another opportunity for REACTS. We can design something, but if it’s not in the code, how does the building official know to accept it or not accept it? We’ve come up with some really cool stuff in California, but the official said, ‘Yeah, I see what you’re doing, but I don’t understand it and know how to approve it.’

“That’s one of the things REACTS will be able to help with also. When we come up with an idea that is valid, then we just need testing to prove it.”

Consortium members will have access to certain proprietary information and research results that come out of the effort. But the intent is to produce data that any firm can draw upon in the future, Macdonald said.

“We’ll see how it goes,” he said. “We’re not drawing a line under it. Some of these cooperatives have gone on for years and years, or basically as long as it’s required. There’s a lot of catch-up to do to generate the data and know-how for wood that we already have for concrete and steel. We’re still at the beginning of what mass timber can do.”

REACTS Consortium industry members

Gold level

Swinerton

Silver level

KPFF Consulting Engineers

Bronze level

Kaiser + Path

StructureCraft

MTC Solutions

DCI Engineers

SRG Partnership

U.S. Forest Service

Rothoblaas

MiTek

Odeh Engineers

DR Johnson

Katerra

Lever Architecture

Aspect Structural Engineers

Holmes Structures

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