When Vy Duong, an assistant field engineer with Turner Construction, was asked whether she would like to spearhead a Women in Construction Week event, she eagerly accepted.

Duong received a degree in civil engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in 2018, and then joined Turner Construction’s Portland office a year ago as an assistant engineer. She learned about the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) and its annual weeklong celebration around the same time.

“I found out about NAWIC through some of my colleagues in the organization,” she said. “And after that they were like, ‘Hey, you’re on a cool project; do you want to lead this tour?’ So I said, ‘Yes, that sounds good.’”

The “cool project” is the expansion of Adidas‘ North American headquarters in Portland’s Overlook neighborhood. There, two mass-timber buildings are being constructed along North Greeley Avenue.

On Wednesday, a group of around 15 women working in construction in the Portland area, and a few men too, joined Duong and others with Turner Construction at the Adidas campus.

“People sometimes ask me why I decided to join Turner,” Duong said. “And I think what makes me the most excited about Turner is that they support things like this. It’s been nothing but support.”

The larger north building – with a hybrid structural system of precast concrete columns, heavy timber beams and cross-laminated timber panels – will be five stories and hold mostly office space, while the smaller south building – all heavy timber – will be three stories and provide amenities for Adidas employees.

“I think there’s a significant desire right now in the Pacific Northwest to utilize wood in structures,” said Colin Foster, a Turner Construction superintendent working on the south building. “I think it derived from the client, Adidas, saying we want to utilize resources from the Pacific Northwest in our new construction. So the design team’s challenge was: How do we do that? And we arrived at this.”

Crews led by general contractor Turner Construction installed the final glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels a little over a month ago. LEVER Architecture designed the buildings, KPFF Consulting Engineers performed structural engineering, and Interface Engineering handled mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering.

Even some mass-plywood panels 12 feet wide by 48 feet long now cover an existing soccer field that is being used to host subcontractor job trailers, materials and deliveries. Sheets of plywood were laminated together to form a much larger piece of lumber.

“We laid this down to protect the existing waterproofing,” said Andy Kavanaugh, a senior superintendent with Turner Construction. “There are two inches of Styrofoam and these are two inches thick. We put this in last April and it’s almost been a year and it’s held up pretty well out in the weather with no protection.”

The south building is being constructed an existing three-level parking garage below grade. Over three months of work was required to prepare the integration of the garage with the new building. This included reinforcement and thickening of existing columns, as well as driving 28 micropiles and pouring new footings for each of them.

“We poured new, huge footings on these piles and we took two-foot-diameter concrete columns that were there and we made them basically four feet with shotcrete and rebar cages all the way up,” Foster said. “So these columns (in each new building) land directly on the columns down in the garage.”

A grand staircase dominates the entrance and lobby for the north building. It has three-ply CLT panels, unlike the five-ply panels in the south building. Also, the south building uses a structural steel building core with buckling restraint bracing for seismic resilience. The north building, meanwhile, uses precast concrete girders and beams for structural support, along with glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels.

Over 700 CLT panels were used on the north building, Kavanaugh said.

“Typically we’d take four loads a day,” he said. “They were stacked four to a truck. We had the glulams attached at the factory, so they all came out like a stack of Legos.”

A Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold rating is being sought for the project. The team is looking to deliver the south building in May and the north building in October.

“That’s definitely one of the highest priorities of Adidas,” Duong said. “They told us that on time and on schedule and under budget is good, but if you don’t get LEED, then this project is a failure.”

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Designers of the proposed Adidas Village expansion in North Portland are working to balance glass, wood and other materials in three buildings that would be constructed on the athletic apparel manufacturer’s campus.

Among the design team’s challenges is to integrate the proposed buildings with existing campus structures constructed in the early 2000s. The Adidas property is also surrounded by a residential neighborhood with little to buffer the corporate campus from people’s homes and the services they need, such as trash collection and delivery vehicles.

The expansion totals 191,586 square feet in three buildings. The project, valued at $143.5 million, went before the Portland Design Commission for design advice for the second time on Thursday.

The architecture remains at a preliminary stage. Renderings for the five-story south building show a structure largely made of mass timber and glass, with a bend at the midpoint meant to avoid the appearance of an imposing glass facade.

“We really worked to break that mass down,” Lever Architecture principal Thomas Robinson said. He and project architect Dannon Canterbury presented the designs.

Lever Architecture has previously used cross-laminated timber in buildings such as Albina Yard. Robinson said use of CLT, which can be prefabricated and made to fit components off-site, would help accelerate construction.

“These are also a lot quieter to build,” he said. “It’s a different experience.”

The south building would have a ground-floor café and a second-story outdoor deck. The north and south buildings would have a soccer field between them. The field is currently on the site, but it would be slightly shifted and improved.

The north building would consist of three stories built atop an existing parking garage. A single-story loading facility is also proposed.

Commissioner Tad Savinar raised the issue of light emanating from the largely transparent south building. Robinson said lighting sources could be placed against the timber slabs so the light source would not be visible from outside the building.

“A lot of times we conceal the lighting right up against the slab,” Robinson said “The important thing is to try to not see the source. That’s a strategy we try to employ in office buildings.”

Eight neighbors testified on Thursday. Some said a turnaround on North Sumner Street should be maintained with adequate space for residents’ parking and access for services.

“We do not have driveways,” said Christina Edmundson, who lives on North Sumner Street. “So if you remove a significant cul-de-sac, if we do not have a place to turn around cars – let alone UPS and things like that – I can’t even envision cars backing up.”

Savinar pushed Adidas representatives to come to a “good neighbor” agreement with the Overlook Neighborhood Association to address issues such as Adidas’ employees parking and smoking in the residential area adjoining campus. Such issues are outside the scope of the Design Commission, but Savinar suggested a formal agreement could ease neighbors’ concerns.

David Ramos, representing Adidas North America, said the company was discussing such an agreement but had not come to a decision.

“It is a point of discussion with the leadership,” he said. “We’re not ready to commit to anything right now.”

The company has met with the neighborhood association twice. Ramos said the parking crunch would be eased by moving the Adidas store to Montgomery Park, and adding parking to the North Portland campus.

The project team will return for design review at a later date.

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Adidas‘ plans for three new buildings on its North Portland campus met with a generally positive reception from the Portland Design Commission on Thursday, but neighbors showed up in force to critique the proposed expansion.

The shoe and apparel manufacturer is pushing forward with a major expansion to accommodate 1,000 new employees at the North Portland site and another at Montgomery Park. Portland is the North American headquarters for the German company.

Neighbors said the campus fits uneasily in the Overlook neighborhood among single-family homes. Neighborhood relations with Adidas have had ups and downs in recent years, with concerns focused on parking, smokers in the surrounding neighborhood and Adidas’ employees having views into homes and yards.

The expansion involves three proposed buildings, referred to as the North building, the South building and a loading building.

The North building would reach five stories and also have five stories of underground parking. The South building would add three stories atop a 1.5-story parking garage, effectively making a 4.5-story structure. The one-story loading facility would be built on the northwest corner of an existing surface parking lot west of North Greeley Avenue.

The three buildings total 191,586 square feet, and the project is valued at $143.5 million.

The project is large enough that Bureau of Development Services staff split the design advice hearing into two meetings. The first, on Thursday, covered the site and massing. A second design advice meeting scheduled for May 24 will cover architecture and landscaping. The project will be subject to a staff decision in a Type II land use review, unless it is appealed to the Design Commission.

Design commissioners noted Adidas has proposed to build far less than the site could hold legally. The buildings in total make for a 0.9-to-1 floor-area ratio; up to 3-to-1 is allowable under city code.

“I think where the new square footage is located is appropriate,” Design Commission Chairwoman Julie Livingston said. “I very much appreciate that Adidas is not building as much as it could on this site. Considering the development capacity of this site, this seems very considerate.”

Lever Architecture is designing the project. Seattle landscape architecture firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, also known as GGN, is on board too.

Commissioner Andrew Clarke raised the possibility of several smaller buildings to create more of a “village feel.” But when asked by Lever Architecture principal Thomas Robinson to clarify, Clarke said the designers should not “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

“Our key is to create a mass that works as a work space but also as a good neighbor,” Robinson said.

The designers have conducted shadow studies to ensure the buildings won’t block neighbors’ sunlight at certain times of year.

Some neighbors said the campus plans are out of character with the surrounding neighborhood.

“The scale of that building, it’s just too close,” said Scott Ringsage, who lives at the corner of North Webster Street and Delaware Avenue and would be a neighbor of the South building.

Already, Ringsage said he feels he can’t garden in his yard without being watched by Adidas employees.

“I can’t go anywhere in my garden and not be looked at,” he said.

Commissioner Tad Savinar said Lever and the rest of the design team have strong track records before the Design Commission.

“I want to tell the neighbors that these firms are really good firms and they tend to get through design review with flying colors where other firms get held back because they’re not doing a good job,” he said.

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