Two Oregon projects have won awards for transforming outdated buildings into vibrant centers of excellence in two very different markets. Both projects showcase creative ways to sustainably transform older structures into reinvigorated contributors to the community.

The Oregon State Hospital Replacement project in Salem received a construction management excellence award from the Construction Management Association of America in the category of new construction with a value greater than $100 million. The project team included Oregon Health Authority, CH2M HILL, HOK, SRG and Hoffman Construction.

The Oregon State Hospital gained widespread recognition as the iconic location for the award-winning 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” starring Jack Nicholson. In continuous operation since 1883, it’s one of the oldest operating mental health facilities in the nation. It’s a big complex – 620 beds and more than 850,027 square feet integrating historic buildings with new facilities and nearly 300,000 square feet of outdoor areas. Adding to this project’s complexity was the need to keep the hospital operating during a rehab project of massive size and complexity.

The Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) in Corvallis, Oregon won a 2012 Excellence in Technology Based Economic Development (TBED) award from the State Science & Technology Institute. The designer was IDC Architects, and the general contractor was Andersen Construction. ONAMI is a venture joining government and nanoscience R&D institutions to cultivate research and commercialization of nanotechnologies.  This award was in the program’s “Commercializing Research” category.

The ONAMI project saw an aging warehouse converted into Oregon’s first signature research center using a modest budget and a lot of design ingenuity. ONAMI exemplifies the international trend in the science and technology community to leverage more research capability with less capital investment to generate higher returns on research investments in private and university research environments.

The award-winning Oregon State Hospital Replacement and ONAMI projects are tributes to the Oregon design community’s vision for applying creative solutions to generate more value with less environmental impact by repurposing existing buildings.

The post Rehabilitation projects transform aging hospital, warehouse into award-winning rehab icons appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

There’s much talk in architectural circles about the nuts and bolts of “integrated project delivery.”  But in an Oct. 24 presentation, IDC Architects Director and Design Principal Jeff Murray took on this topic from a more philosophical standpoint.

The venue was the third annual EcoCommercial Building Network Executive Workshop in Pittsburgh, where building industry leaders including IBM and the Green Building Alliance shared concepts for promoting sustainable building design and construction materials.

Jeff’s presentation talked about such utilitarian tools as energy modeling, airflow modeling, 3D design and Lean practices.  But it was discussion of the philosophy motivating an ethos of sustainability that got the audience most engaged.

“The built environment either empowers people or frustrates them,” Jeff observes:

Carnegie Mellon University now has a whole department on Human/Computer Interaction.  This is a focus on how people interact with computers, rather than the technical aspects of how computers compute.  This is why Apple is the most successful company on the planet today, not because they have better hard drives or processors, but because they have better design regarding Human/Computer Interaction.

“There’s a corollary here to the way we design buildings.  Effective space utilization depends on us finding intelligent ways to understand and focus on the building’s spatial network as much as the building’s elements and systems; and on how the spaces enable human activity.  Architecture can be thought of as Human/Environment Interaction.

“Budgets get tighter, clients demand more, building complexity has increased exponentially.  Trust me, it was a lot easier coordinating stained glass and stone sculptures and flying buttresses with a one-century construction schedule for a Gothic cathedral than all that we have to deal with today.  Nonetheless, the question in front of us is — how can we as a design and construction industries do better?

“It is possible today to make significant breakthroughs in the way building projects are delivered, adding value while reducing costs.  These breakthroughs can be achieved through an attitude focused on whole project success; a project delivery process focused on effectiveness; on efficiency by reducing waste and planning effectively and focusing on continuous improvement; and innovation as defined by Einstein (never stop questioning and the positive results will be new ideas that make a difference).

“Our attitude is simple; focus on the success of the whole project, and our own individual success will take care of itself.  And remember that beauty should not be confused with luxury; delightful human-centered environments can be created within a variety of budgets.”

The post Philosophies that motivate green building ethos appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

CH2M HILL Urban Designer and Infrastructure Architect James McGrath recently savored a bucket list adventure – a week exploring the phenomenal biodiversity of the remote Amazon jungles of Brazil.

This was no sightseeing eco-junket with bite-sized tastes of the wild from zip lines and air conditioned Land Rovers. Every morning participants were up before dawn for 15-kilometer hikes in a jungle so remote one can walk for 10,000 kilometers without seeing another human being.

James was part of a Corporate Eco Forum team of 15 explorers from such Fortune 500 companies as HP, GM, Bayer, Kimberly Clark, Dow, Dell and Johnson & Johnson who, like James, saw the Amazon’s overwhelming biological diversity as a source of professional inspiration. In James’ case the trip was about evolving and expanding his thinking on sustainable design.  James observes:

Sustainability has to move beyond the walls of our buildings and into the realm of our neighborhoods, campuses and districts.  With unprecedented urbanization amidst the greatest ecological resource on the planet, Brazil represents our best real-time laboratory for driving a preservation of the wild near a high-intensity, high-productivity, and high efficiency urban settlement.”

The trip reaffirmed James’ belief that natural ecosystems offer abundant inspiration to architecture. He related a story of British architect Joseph Paxton, who during a walk through the observatory in Kew Gardens saw an intact and decomposing giant water lily. This Amazon native had been brought to London, like the rubber tree seeds, and cultivated with success. Curious, Paxton placed his 5-year-old daughter one of the intact pads, which easily supported her weight, and then studied the intricate skeletal structure revealed as the other decomposed.

This epiphany inspired Paxton’s design of the Crystal Palace at London’s Hyde Park, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 and was the first prefabricated steel and glass wall building. Paxton’s lessons learned from the Brazilian water lily became the impetus for much of the modern architecture we see today.

“The interconnected solutions that the Amazon represents can be a template for creating similar interlocked solutions in high-performance urban eco-districts – the relationship between energy, water, waste infrastructure and buildings/uses can replicate the same zero-sum system of the rainforest,” he says. “This is the time for us to move beyond discrete sustainable creations – a sustainable building, sustainable street, etc.

We need to jump scales to ‘this is a sustainable district…this is a part of a human settlement integrated with a natural settlement, and all those pieces are working together.’”

The post Amazon adventure inspires architect’s vision for community-wide eco ethos appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

John Strickland has over 25 years of experience leading major design-build and construction management projects, is an active member of a Construction Industry Institute (CII) research team and serves as a CH2M HILL Lean Construction leader.  That experience has provided plenty of evidence that the attitudes that prevail on a project team are as critical as the mechanics of project management.

Here John reflects on how shaping a positive collective project team attitude begins with the mindset of each individual team member:

Reliability and keeping promises are important things to most people.  We all like to think of ourselves as “highly reliable” and speculate the world would be a better place if only those around us were similarly virtuous.

Our own failures to keep promises are usually for good reasons – something came up that we hadn’t expected, or maybe somebody else failed in their promise to us, which caused us to not come through.  We are, after all, generally very reliable.

When others fail to keep a promise or meet our expectations, however, we have a tendency to attribute the failure to a character flaw – “that person simply isn’t reliable” – and start basing our decisions, and our behavior toward the person, on that faulty attribution.  If this happens on a frequent basis (which it frequently does), the culture of the job degrades.

The continuous improvement philosophy of Kaizen emerged at the end of World War II to reinvigorate Japan’s shattered morale as well as its shattered economy.  That’s why Kaizen offers more than the mechanics of productivity improvement.  Kaizen couples a positive mental attitude toward change with continuous improvement systems that support change.  The philosophy promotes nurturing and rewarding workers who contribute to improved teamwork in positive ways.

My experience over the years has been that when every member of a project team truly believes that suggestions for improvement are not being wielded as weapons of criticism but rather opportunities for growth and change, the results can be anywhere from impressive to outright amazing.

Lots of friction, hard feelings and sub-optimal results could be avoided if we improved our ability to communicate requests and commitments clearly and maintained an “assumption of positive intent” mindset.  Positive change breeds positive performance.

The post The mistake of confusing poor communication with poor character appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Roger Pearson, Director of Planning for CH2M HILL’s IDC Architects, has spent a lot of years (37+) as a master planner for industrial, commercial and technology manufacturing sites around the world.  Over time he’s seen developers, designers and the communities they serve transition from adversarial relationships to a more harmonious melding of common interests when creating visions for technology parks.

Oregon has a long history of reconciling the interests of technology development with conservation of agricultural land.  Here Roger shares observations about how these interests are also being delicately balanced on the other side of the country in the “Science & Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park” (STAMP) project in upstate New York.

“The 6-year STAMP process has been a valuable reminder of the importance of stakeholder involvement to finding harmonious solutions for complex and controversial projects.

At the outset, the idea of a major new technology manufacturing campus within an historically rural agricultural area prompted significant concern in the host community.  Although intrigued with the potential economic benefits of a technology manufacturing development, residents were concerned with losing the agricultural heritage and character of their community.

The challenge with STAMP has been to establish a long-term process that eventually leads to a world-class technology campus, while ensuring that the new campus would be welcomed and supported by the community.  Over the past 6 years, an open, inclusive community engagement process has been implemented.  As a result, community support for the initiative has grown and the New York State government has recognized STAMP as a priority development for the regional economy.

The STAMP stakeholder-based process included the following components:

• Advisory Committee Meetings
• Public Information Meetings
• Community Opinion Survey
• Town Board Meetings
• Benchmarking Visits
• State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) Public Hearing

This open, inclusive process resulted in the following significant benefits to both the project and the community:

• Established communication linkages
• Built goodwill
• Improved project plans
• Fostered pride of authorship
• Improved project competitiveness

From the outset, the project team believed that robust community engagement would foster project success.  Consistent adherence to this philosophy has taken the STAMP initiative from a state of community apprehension to open dialog and general support.  STAMP is now moving forward into implementation and is widely seen as transformative for the regional economy at the local, regional and state levels.

Watching people with differing concerns and backgrounds share and resolve their concerns in a spirit of mutual respect has been an inspiring validation of the value of civility in pursuit of prudent community planning.”

The post Stakeholder-based solutions smooth technology park planning appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

In my last blog I discussed how Oregon’s reputation for green commerce has helped increase our profile as a destination for data center investment. In this follow-up I asked CH2M HILL mechanical engineer Kevin Duell to shed light on one of the approaches being used to make data centers even more appealing to proponents of green investment in Oregon – the “hot server.”

Data centers are the life’s blood of the world’s communications and commerce. And the lifeblood of data centers is servers – every website you see lives on a server somewhere. Servers – densely arrayed microcomputers – constitute a data center’s brains and vitals and they require constant and aggressive cooling.

Servers are amazingly powerful. But there’s never a free lunch – data centers are also inordinate consumers of energy compared to many other types of facilities. It’s been calculated that data centers consume about 2 percent of the electricity in the U.S. and 1.3 percent of the world’s electricity overall – and growing. No wonder data center owners are always looking for the next big idea for reducing energy consumption.

One such idea is dubbed the “hot server,” a more robust device built to tolerate higher heat levels. An average data center using hot servers could reduce its electricity consumption by a third – a very significant savings in energy and cost. To more fully appreciate the greening potential of innovations like this, it’s fun to extrapolate their impact beyond a single facility to the fast-growing data center community at large. For instance, if hot servers could be installed in every data center in the U.S. alone, it’s estimated the annual electricity savings would nearly equal Ireland’s yearly usage.

The environmental benefits of high-heat servers are dramatic because they ripple through an entire facility: less (often zero) chilled water capacity is needed to cool air, fewer fans are needed to move cooled air through the facility and less floor space is needed because heat-resistant servers can be packed more densely in racks. These factors ultimately lead to smaller building footprints requiring fewer construction resources, which further compounds the sustainability benefits.

Not surprisingly, hot servers have already found their way into several Oregon data center projects. The hot server is just one of many innovations in hardware and cooling strategies that are making data centers even more appealing to places – like Oregon – that take particular pride in fostering environmentally responsible business.

The post Like peppers, some of the best data centers are green and hot appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Fresh from late July’s Data Center Investment Conference in Washington, DC, CH2M HILL VP & Global Director of Sustainable Solutions Jeff Cross is seeing how global changes in the booming data center marketplace – including green energy and clean energy initiatives – are poised to play to Oregon’s favor.

Some of the biggest Internet companies have already built data centers in Oregon, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.  Another project is underway – conversion of a former Hynix semiconductor plant in Eugene into the new Eugene Technology Center, a mega data center offering nearly a million square feet of space.  This project exemplifies the “sustainable repurposing” trend of refurbishing aging science and technology buildings to achieve lower cost and environmental impact than building new structures would entail.

Jeff cites other evidence of this green wave around the country — “sustainable technology parks” targeting data center development:

• , a 640-acre development combining clean fossil fuels, renewable energy, alternative energy, smart grid and energy storage targeting research facilities and cloud computing data centers.
• , offering an unusual blend of on-site renewable power including geothermal, solar, wind, and energy storage on a behemoth 10,000+ acre site.
• In June Microsoft broke ground on a new data center site in Cheyenne, Wyoming, just 18 miles from Niobrara, to tap into the region’s $1.2 billion in economic activity including power creation, data centers, natural gas plants and more.
• In May Apple announced that its new 20-megawatt data center in Maiden, North Carolina will feature on-site renewable energy production to produce 60 percent of its power onsite.

Progressive projects like these synch up with Oregon’s reputation for environmentally responsible economic development.  We also have a climatic advantage over many other regions.  Our moderate temperatures are ideal for using outside air to cool servers, which offer potentially huge energy savings for data center operators.

As the data center market heats up, the talk among industry leaders at the Data Center Investment Conference reminded Jeff of surfers comparing notes on their endless quest to catch that “perfect wave.”

In the data center business, the green wave is increasingly looking like the one to catch.  With the right focus, it’s a wave Oregon is well positioned to ride.

The post Can Oregon ride the sustainable/renewable energy data center wave? appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Denny Stamm, a vice president of industrial solutions for , has spent more than 35 years as a change agent, trainer and international speaker on lean management and and bringing greater efficiencies to organizational planning.

On a recent pharmaceutical project in China, Denny and his lean team used lean supply chain planning to achieve impressive reductions in the plant’s footprint and use of raw materials.

But as Denny explains below, achieving lean success in design and construction projects such as the China plant isn’t just about bricks and mortar. It starts with getting people on a project team lean between the ears.

Here are some of Denny’s thoughts on the need to first transform people in order to transform projects into greater levels of efficiency.

Many managers and change agents perceive people as a problem. Many of these same managers also claim that people are their greatest asset.

Question: Which of these assumptions is true? Answer: It depends on you.

We’ve all formed mind-sets that allow us to feel secure in our day-to-day activities and circumstances. We design “programs” based on our mind-sets. 

When proposing change, we are asking people to change their programs.

Knowledge of this helps explain why studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicate that a very high percentage of Lean implementations fail without a change of management personnel. There ought to be a better way to help insure success than changing the management.

This means going back to the core of what motivates people and breaking loose from the grip of their comfort zones. People cannot change without a new program.

Organizations reflect the complexities of the people within it. Success and failure can hinge upon the recognition and alignment of these complexities as a leadership issue.

Training can teach people how to implement and sustain successful change. However, it does not address motivation to embrace change. Recognizing, understanding and working to change people’s mind-sets can help overcome the challenges associated with human complexity.

Make people aware of the reasons they are uncomfortable with change.  Help them to overcome their mind-sets. Managers can become effective agents of change. Train everyone well in the new ways of doing things and they can indeed be your most valuable assets.

If, on the other hand, you simply begin to change things and ask them to behave differently, they will be a problem.

It depends on you.

The post Getting lean between the ears appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Nathan Clark Corser, Design Principal with IDC Architects (a CH2M Hill company) led an architectural design studio for the University of Oregon, Portland Program with Karl Burkheimer of the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts. This effort brought together students from both institutions along with the participation of Anderson Anderson Architecture of San Francisco for their first design/build project here in Portland.

With the financial support of an anonymous OCAC donor, the goal of this design/build workshop was to design a smoking pavilion representative and expressive of the two institutions’ ethos – a structure of both function and craft. The resulting structure was erected on the campus of the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts campus and has fittingly been dubbed the “Burn Box.”

The following are some of Nathan’s musings on the value of such exercises.

Nearly every project and every project team, from owner to designer to construction worker, hopes to benefit from the collective wisdom and experience of the other project team members.

The idea that a lone genius can know and direct everything has given way to a broader and more comprehensive understanding that an active exchange of information and ideas in an open design/build environment produces better projects on many levels.

One key way in which stronger, more informed, integrated and interdisciplinary design and construction can be accomplished is by training future architects and engineers through design/build studios that engage and bridge both the academic and private industries or public entities.

A design/build education that results in a tangible built project that impacts upon the overall built environment can go a long way to introducing aspiring architects and engineers to the potential rewards and, possibly more importantly, the risks that accompany any built project.

Working in real time, at full scale with an actual client, site and materials is an invaluable experience, especially for those for whom building, crafting and collaborating has yet to be a major part of their professional experience.

Equally, the experience of working with and having to be directly responsible for one’s ideas when working with an owner provides direct and invaluable exposure to the realities of how and why projects result in their ultimate form.  What assets and constraints define built solutions: Money?  Time?  Material availability?  Then there is that last key component, what does the owner WANT???

This is the design/build learning environment at its best.

Design/build education provides a necessary and invaluable perspective to our future workmates and professionals, preparing them for the reality, the give and take of the evolving and increasingly global, integrative, multi-disciplinary design and construction environment.

The post The value of hands-on experience with design-build appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The construction business presents myriad circumstances that can either bedevil or delight an owner.

A scenario that falls into this category is the contractor’s turnover of a project to the owner. Whether a facility is industrial or commercial, there are inevitably items that require expertise and training to be transferred to the owner through a prudent commissioning process.

Operations and maintenance responsibility for a facility’s many electrical and mechanical systems that were the responsibility of the contractor during construction suddenly become the responsibility of the owner.

Moving from a role of inspection and punch listing to that of operating and maintaining building systems can involve more than a little culture shock. The transition can be simple and straightforward for light manufacturing or commercial buildings, or long and involved for complex manufacturing facilities.

Each building system should pass a checkout process to validate that it’s met the requirements stated in the construction documents.  Linkage of user requirements to commissioning steps should be welcomed by all parties, since this allows both owner and contractor to jointly conclude and agree the project has been satisfactorily completed.

Avoiding this process typically leads to higher operating costs.

I recall a project in which the software controlling a critical building system contained a minor fault that had gone undetected throughout construction. Turnover to the owner was completed without a proper commissioning process to save money. In the years following, the flawed software proceeded to incur needless costs in the form of maintenance labor, inefficient pump performance and excessive energy costs. These expenses greatly exceeded whatever an initial commissioning process would have cost.

The lesson: beware the seductive penny-wise-pound-foolish miscalculation of bypassing commissioning during the turnover process.

The post Skipping commissioning can put your project out of commission appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.