Officials gathered at the North Portland Library on Friday to celebrate ground being broken on a project to update the facility.

The project includes renovating the existing building at 512 N. Killingsworth St. and constructing two additions – a dedicated space for a Black Cultural Center and a staff space expansion – to increase the square footage from 8,700 to 10,200.

“In addition to those two expansions, we’re completely renovating and seismically upgrading the rest of the building,” Kevin Kearns, Multnomah County’s project manager for the North Portland Library project, said during a meeting of the county’s board of commissioners on Thursday.

During that meeting, the board approved a resolution for a guaranteed maximum price of slightly more than $8 million for project construction. Andersen Construction was selected as construction manager/general contractor.

LEVER Architecture partnered with Noll & Tam Architects of Berkeley, California, on the project’s design. That phase is now complete.

New building features will include a dedicated children’s area, a new welcome desk at the center of the main floor, two new restrooms, and an exterior walkway that will allow after-hours access to the Black Cultural Center and the updated community room.

The project’s budget is $12.8 million. Funding is coming from a 2020 bond measure approved by voters in 2020. The North Portland Library renovation and expansion is the fourth major project within the bond program to advance.

The library shut down in April to prepare for expansion. Construction mobilization will begin in June. Construction is expected to finish in June 2024. The library is scheduled to reopen that fall.

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John McMichael and his team at Interface Engineering knew they were going to face some big challenges when it came to the firm’s role in the Collaborative Life Sciences Building and Skourtes Tower project in Portland’s South Waterfront District.

Oregon Health and Sciences University and the Oregon University System, which own the project, made it clear from the earliest stages that they wanted the teaching and research facility to earn a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating. But the Interface team was well aware that laboratory buildings tend to require substantial energy and water – two areas that are critical for earning a rating in the green building program.

“Our challenge was: ‘Can we save enough … points? Can we get there from here,’ ” said McMichael, an Interface principal.

In the end, Interface’s engineering efforts not only saved enough points to earn the project a LEED rating, but also helped it walk away Wednesday night with the title of Project of the Year in the 2015 Engineering Excellence Awards.

The annual awards, coordinated by the Oregon chapter of the American Council of Engineering Companies, recognize outstanding engineering work by Oregon firms in categories that include research and studies, transportation, water resources, and surveying and mapping.

While most projects entered earn honor awards, and a handful are given grand awards, there’s usually just one project that captures the eyes of the judging panel as an outstanding example of solid engineering and innovative problem solving.

The Collaborative Life Sciences Building and Skourtes Tower did indeed require Interface to think outside the box from the very beginning, according to McMichael.

“The schedule was really fast-paced,” he said. “Typically, that’s challenging for the contractor. But this time it was also challenging for us. They wanted to start building things before other things were completely designed.”

In order to accommodate that approach, Interface turned to building information modeling. Using BIM techniques allowed Interface to design in real-time, thereby allowing a similar real-time coordination of a long list of specialty subcontractors working on the project.

The approach also came in handy with issues that Interface encountered regarding space constraints. In many projects, a ceiling space will have individual zones each dedicated to sprinklers or domestic water or lab exhaust. But the Collaborative Life Sciences Building and Skourtes Tower project lacked the luxury of big floor-to-floor heights. As a result, the different systems all had to fit in the narrow ceiling space.

“This isn’t a situation where you have a lot of space – we were crossing (the systems),” McMichaels said. “BIM helped us navigate that.”

Employing BIM alone wouldn’t have necessarily been enough to keep the project moving, however.

“We have some good mechanical contractors, plumbing and sheet metal contractors,” McMichael said. “If I was going to pick contractors to get a job done, I probably wouldn’t have picked any others.”

Working under JE Dunn’s lead on the project also helped Interface learn a valuable lesson related to using a co-location approach.

Some project teams try to employ the approach, which brings all members of the team into the same room to discuss aspects of a project, through the entire project. However, JE Dunn mainly used it in the early stages of the project, and then stepped back from the approach once systems were in place and work was moving along, McMichael said.

“I think there’s key times, when you have some formative stages, where you put people together. That can help speed up the process,” he said. “But once a lot of those decisions are made, when you’re doing just coordination stuff, you just need to put the pedal to the metal.

“A lot of people have misconceptions that it needs to happen the whole time (during a project). We cut the cord at some point and it worked out just fine.”

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When it comes to design, engineering and construction, turning a Douglas fir forest into a building isn’t that tough. But take that concept and turn it inside out by turning a building into the structural equivalent of a Douglas fir forest, and you’re talking about an entirely different challenge.

The project team members tasked with the design, engineering and construction of the Bullitt Center in Seattle believed they were up to performing the latter feat. No matter that they were basically stepping into uncharted engineering territory, with Portland-based PAE Consulting Engineers leading the way in the area of mechanical and electrical design.

In its project packet submitted for consideration in the annual Engineering Excellence Awards run by the American Council of Engineering Companies of Oregon, PAE likened the six-story Bullitt Center to a fir forest. The commercial office building, the company wrote, was designed and built to use “only nature’s abundance” in order to provide its tenants with fresh air, light, energy and heating and cooling.

For statisticians and data lovers, that sustainable description can be represented in hard numbers. The building was designed and built, for example, to use 80 percent less water and be 83 percent more energy efficient than typical office buildings constructed in Seattle. Relying on client workstations and laptops instead of traditional desktop computers was calculated to reduce plug loads by 78 percent. And a 56,000-gallon cistern captures rainwater that’s filtered for potable uses.

Completing the work that would allow the building to hit those numbers – and operate as a net-zero structure when it came to energy and water use – was sometimes easier said than done. Obtaining the permits for that potable rainwater system took almost two years to secure, and required the project team to further brainstorm the building’s system to add a chlorination injection component.

No part of the building was off limits when it came to finding unique ways to achieve sustainability. In the restrooms, for example, the toilets operate on a “foam flush” principle, which uses less than a cup of water and natural soap. The overall amount of water saved, compared to toilets traditionally used in office buildings: a whopping 96 percent.

Working on the Bullitt Center not only encouraged team members to stretch the way they designed and constructed a building, but also required them to learn new ways of working with each other.

For the architects, it was often like “trying to paint the Mona Lisa with 15 engineers behind you telling you where to put the brush,” PAE President Paul Schwer said.

Nevertheless, Schwer said his company appreciated the opportunity to push the building envelope to create a building that some said couldn’t be built, especially in Seattle’s cloudy climate.

“We’re problem solvers,” Schwer said. “The most challenges and the bigger the problem, the more we rise to the occasion.”

The Oregon ACEC Engineering Excellence Project of the Year title is the latest accolade for the Bullitt Center, which last year garnered the Sustainable Building of the Year award from World Architecture News and a Vision 2013 award for most innovative new construction from the Seattle 2030 District.

Project: The Bullitt Center

Owner: The Bullitt Foundation

Developer: Point32

Mechanical/electrical engineer: PAE

Civil engineer: Springline Design

Structural Engineer: DCI Engineers

Architect: The Miller Hull Partnership

Construction manager/general contractor: Schuchart

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Portland-based PAE Consulting Engineers Inc. on Wednesday night received the top honor at the American Council of Engineering Companies of Oregon Engineering Excellence Awards. The firm’s work on the Bud Clark Commons, for Home Forward, was named Project of the Year.

Projects submitted for the award were judged based on original application of new or existing technologies, future value to the engineering profession and public perception, sustainability, complexity and the degree to which the project met or exceeded the client’s needs.

Six other projects received Grand Awards in the competition, while another 25 were named Honor Award winners.

Former Portland Mayor Bud Clark, for whom the facility was named, introduced the idea for the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness. The Bud Clark Commons was designed as a component in the plan, which was implemented in 2006.

Home Forward, formerly the Portland Housing Authority, was tasked with working toward a viable, cost-effective solution to address chronic homelessness. The project was completed within the $26 million budget and in a short period of time. Essentially, in less than three years the process went from participants and stakeholders brainstorming ideas to the doors being opened.

“About 3,000 people will sleep in the streets tonight around Portland,” Home Forward project manager Julie Livingston said. “That’s the problem. The solution is a lot more complicated. How do we help these people who are already often disenfranchised and marginalized in a way that helps them transition and function in society?”

Recognizing that the homeless population is actually a huge expense to county and city resources – from stressing the capacities of law enforcement and hospital emergency rooms to causing damage to public and private property – Livingston and her team at Home Forward sat down with PAE consulting engineer Paul Schwer, Ralph DiNola of Green Building Services and a host of other stakeholders and contributors to the project. They were mindful that every person they helped was actually a financial benefit to the community.

“What we said at the outset at these initial meetings was something like, ‘OK, what if we don’t worry about budget and restrictions and just come up with ideas, then find a way to make those ideas work,’ ” Schwer said. “So we ‘blue-skyed’ a couple of charrettes and it all came together as a team effort.”

Both Schwer and Livingston stressed that it was a strong sense of teamwork that brought about project success.

PAE people got involved, as did all the principals and stakeholders not only from project design, but in the ‘muddy boots’ stage of implementation. Holst Architecture, responsible for project design, was one of those contributors. Originally, Home Forward stated that a goal for the project was to be “energy efficient – green.”

A full array of roof-mounted solar collection panels reduce outside energy requirements for the facility’s 130 apartment units and 90-bed shelter. Efficiencies were also implemented in the structural skin to reduce air leakage. Sensors linked to each apartment’s thermostat turn off the HVAC when the window of a unit is opened to avoid wasting energy. Also, gray water is filtered and sent back into the plumbing in a dedicated “purple pipe” system for toilets, significantly reducing overall water consumption.

In total, the efficiency systems were enough to earn a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum rating and save $60,000 in annual operating costs. Those savings translated into providing a full meal 365 days a year for every resident and visitor to the building from a kitchen and dining facility built into the center.

“This is a model facility,” said Stacy Riger, PAE’s marketing manager. “There’s nothing like it anywhere in the country (and) maybe the world. We hope it stands as a model for what can be done.”

As the winner in Oregon, PAE’s Bud Clark Commons entry will be submitted for consideration in the National ACEC Engineering Excellence Awards. They will be held in Washington, D.C., on April 23.

For more information, visit www.acec.org/getinvolved/eea.cfm.

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ACEC Oregon 2013 Engineering Excellence Grand Award Winners (Click on links to see images and more project information)

• CH2M Hill – U.S. Congresswoman Darlene Hooley Pedestrian Bridge at Gibbs Street

• Kittelson & Associates Inc. and OBEC Consulting Engineers – OR 213/I-205 to Redland Road Crossing

• OBEC Consulting Engineers – Chambers Covered Bridge Rehabilitation

• Parametrix – State Highway 99W: Newberg and Dundee Bypass

• PAE Consulting Engineers – Chemeketa Community College Health Sciences Complex

• URS Corp. – Portland Streetcar Loop Project

ACEC Oregon 2013 Engineering Excellence Honor Winners

• BergerABAM – Architectural Digester: Gresham Waste Water Treatment Plant Administration Building Reuse

• BergerABAM, West Yost Associates and Jacobs Associates – Outfall 27/Sellwood CSO Control

• Cornforth Consultants Inc. (Landslide Technology Division) – Managing Landslides in West Africa

• David Evans and Associates Inc. – I-205 Railroad Avenue (99E Dunes Drive – 10^th Street)

• David Evans and Associates Inc. – Rock Creek Trail Extension

• DKS Associates – Portland South Auditorium District

• GeoEngineers Inc. – Port of Portland Terminal 6 – Berths 604/605 Modernization

• GeoEngineers Inc. – Walla Walla River Habitat Restoration

• GHD Inc. – FWS Malheur NWR Fish Screening and Passage Projects

• Harper Houf Peterson Righellis Inc. – Trolley Trail

• Hart Crowser and Otak – Crystal Creek Pedestrian Suspension Bridge

• Hart Crowser and PACE Engineers – Chinook Water Supply Restoration

• HDR Engineering – Wyeth Fishing Treaty Access Bridge Site

• HNTB Corp. in association with OBDP (HDR/Fluor) – I-84: Exit 64 (Hood River) – Bundle 224

• Kennedy/Jenks Consultants – Gearhart Water Treatment and Supply Facilities Project

• Keller and Associates Inc. – City of Ashland Comprehensive Sanitary Sewer Master Plan

• Kleinfelder – City of Troutdale Waste Water Treatment Plant Demolition Action Plan

• Otak Inc. – Battle Creek Property Redevelopment

• Otak Inc. – I-5: Wilsonville Road Interchange

• Parametrix – Horn Creek Water Treatment Plant

• Parametrix – Roy Creek Culvert Replacement

• Parsons Brinckerhoff – Fourth Plain Transit Improvement Project

• PBS Engineering + Environmental – Junction City Wetland Mitigation

• T.Y. Lin International – OR 43: Willamette River Bridge (Oregon City)

• T.Y. Lin International – I-5: Elkhead Road to OR 126 – Knowles Creek Design/Build

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“Out of sight, out of mind” may be a solid plan of action, unless it’s being applied to a failing, leaky sewer pipe running under a recreational lake in one of the Portland-metro area’s most affluent communities.

Officials with the city of Lake Oswego, located about eight miles south of Portland, knew the pipe buried under the city’s most notable body of water needed to be replaced. It was too small, corroded and likely to give way in the event of a sizable earthquake. But the obvious choices – replacing the pipe in the riverbed or installing a new pipe on land – promised to be too costly and disruptive.

Then a third option surfaced – an alternative that came with a fair share of uncertainty and risk. A first-of-its-kind buoyant gravity sewer system could be developed and lie along the surface of the lake.

Now completed and fully functioning, the $100 million Lake Oswego Interceptor Sewer project is already the talk of engineering circles around the country. Closer to home, on Wednesday it was named Project of the Year at the 2012 ACEC Oregon Excellence in Engineering Awards, earning nods for Brown and Caldwell, the lead design consultant and project manager, and Shannon and Wilson, which handled geotechnical engineering exploration, analysis and design.

The centerpiece of the system, known more commonly as LOIS, is an almost two-mile stretch of more than 29,000 feet of thick-walled HDPE sewer and buoyancy pipe. The serpentine pipe, which is weightless under water, is designed to have a 100-year lifespan. Custom brackets on the line are connected to soft lake sediment and gravel layers up to 200 feet deep by flexible wire rope and ground anchors. Secure but not restrictive, the anchoring system will allow the pipe to flex and move freely during an earthquake.

A leap of engineering faith

When the idea of a buoyant gravity sewer was first floated, it drew skepticism from city officials, Lake Oswego residents and even some members of the project design team. But using a process of investigation, analysis and review, and testing, anticipated hurdles were cleared away one by one.

With each step forward, support for the project grew. Looking to further strengthen a relationship with the public, the project team drew up what it called “good neighbor guidelines” that helped keep residents informed. From timelines to budgeting, officials relied on a website, YouTube videos and social media “tweets” and posts.

The sewer line replacement was more than 10 years in the making, from initial discussions through final construction. In the end, however, LOIS arrived on time and 10 percent under budget.

In its entry for the awards, Brown and Caldwell acknowledged that the project’s success wouldn’t have been possible without a strong team of subconsultants. KPFF Consulting Engineers, for example, handled structural design of pile supports and manholes for some near-shore reaches of the system while Makai Ocean Engineering was responsible for finite element modeling of the pipeline. Anchor QEA LLC took care of environmental permitting while Pinnell/Busch tackled analysis of the contractor schedule. Meanwhile, Westlake Consultants focused on survey aspects of the project, and Anderson Engineering handled detailed design of the project’s buoyant manholes to make they were code compliant.

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Submitting firm: Parson Brinckerhoff
Client/owner: Lane Transit District

In 1995, the Lane Transit District decided to improve bus service for the Eugene-Springfield community by creating a bus rapid transit system. The goal was to offer travel times competitive to driving a car with operation benefits similar to light rail, but at a fraction of the cost.

In 2001, the transit district brought Parsons Brinckerhoff on board to provide design services for the EmX bus rapid transit system.

The Gateway extension represents the second phase of what eventually will be a 61-mile system. The 5.9-mile extension is marked by four miles of exclusive transit lanes and 14 stations, while providing connections between downtown Eugene, downtown Springfield, the University of Oregon, a rapidly-growing neighborhood around Gateway Mall and the PeaceHealth RiverBend Hospital campus.

When it came to design and construction of the extension, Lane Transit District once again turned to Parsons Brinckerhoff.

As the prime design consultant for the project, the firm led a group of seven subconsultants that worked together to develop a corridor solution that relied heavily on innovation to keep costs low while creating a smooth-flowing, rapid system. GPS tracking and radio signals activate bus priority at traffic signals, for example, while creative leveraging of state and federal programs allowed delivery of a $42 million project with a minimum outlay of capital.

The Gateway extension was delivered on schedule and under budget. More than 400 jobs were created by construction.

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The Port of Portland uses propylene glycol as a deicing fluid to keep its runways clear during inclement weather. But the agency, known for its commitment to environmental stewardship, was concerned the fluid was running off the runways when it rained and washing into a nearby slough slated to be diverted into the Columbia River.

The port decided to create an expanded collection and storage system for the runoff, and build an on-site treatment plant. The $74 million project, planned to take shape over five years, included creation of storage facilities capable of handling 13 million gallons of runoff and installation of 6.5 miles of pipeline.

CDM Smith was brought on to handle design and program management of the system. The firm conducted a pilot treatment study, provided engineering services during construction and facility start-up, and served as a liaison between the port and the public to gain community support for the project.

The pilot treatment study determined that anaerobic fluidized bed reactors would be the most cost-effective and efficient system. Although two other airports already use the process, Portland International Airport would have the largest system in the world.

Expectations for the project were high from the start. CDM had to balance the needs of airline stakeholders while working in an environmentally sensitive area.

“The CDM team did an excellent job supporting our work with the airline carriers and community stakeholders, including environmental groups, the city of Portland and watershed councils,” said Susan Aha, project manager for the port.

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In 1991, the city of Portland began work on a project designed to control 55 combined sewer outfalls along the Willamette River and the Columbia Slough.

The $1.4 billion project consisted of several phases and milestones. The largest part of the program was the $390 million East Side Combine Sewer Overflow Tunnel Project, which called for a 29,180-foot-long tunnel with a 22-foot interior diameter to be constructed 120 feet beneath Portland’s Central Eastside Industrial District.

Parsons Brinckerhoff was brought on as lead design engineer and a crucial member of a three-way partnership that included contractor Kiewit/Bilfinger Berger JV and the city of Portland.

The complexity of the project coupled with challenging soil conditions required that the project team tap into innovative and new technologies. For the east side big pipe, that meant installing steel-fiber concrete for tunnel linings, tackling new approaches for shaft build-out, and planning and navigating the longest successful single microtunneling drive ever in the U.S.

Innovation also extended to the project’s contracting mechanism. Parsons Brinckerhoff reviewed results from a city investigation into contracts used for tunneling projects for other agencies in other parts of the country. Parsons Brinckerhoff then helped develop a plan specific to the east side project – a fixed-fee, cost-reimbursable model designed to encourage team members to work as efficiently as possible in regard to time and cost.

The east side project was finished in September 2011, two months ahead of schedule and for about $55 million less than expected.

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Hidroeléctrica Choloma, a hydropower developer, held rights to a potential small project on the slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains in Guatemala. But the site came with a few problems that needed to be solved before the project could move forward.

The site had plenty of head, but the main stream of the nearby Coloma River had enough flow to accommodate a project able to produce only three or four megawatts.

McMillen, serving as project manager, and other team members decided to take advantage of several smaller streams flowing down the slopes about six kilometers west of the river. They came up with a design for a small dam with water intakes on each of the six streams, with all of the flow then collected in a six-kilometer-long collector pipeline. The combined flow was large enough that it allowed the project to expand to 9.7 megawatts.

The project team thought the pipe could send all of the collected water to a small reservoir and dam that would serve as the project’s headworks. Hydraulics of the intake and collector pipe locations dictated that the reservoir and dam be built at an elevation of 647 meters. But there was only one suitable location on the Choloma River that hit that mark. And the conditions there were less than ideal: no bedrock and lots of clay, sand and subsurface water.

The project team decided to look in another direction. On a nearby ridge, workers cleared a site, blasted away bedrock and constructed a large, steel water tank at an elevation of 647 meters. A 42-inch, 2,950-meter-long steel pipe was installed to carry the water to a powerhouse 460 meters below the tank.

The project was designed and constructed to meet international standards for green power. The project owner has applied for green certification to be able to sell output as sustainable energy.

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