Students and faculty returning to the University of Portland campus this fall will have a new facility in which to stay in shape. The Beauchamp Recreation & Wellness Center is a $23.7 million, 73,000-square-foot building that features three gymnasiums, a suspended running track, climbing and bouldering walls, cardio and strength training areas, classrooms, and administrative space.

Skanska USA Building began work on the project in the spring of 2014 and turned it over to the university earlier this month. The building was designed by the San Francisco office of 360 Architecture, which was acquired by HOK earlier this year, and Portland-based Soderstrom Architects.

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With record enrollment in recent years, the University of Portland is planning to build a 4-story, 140-room residence hall on its campus on North Willamette Boulevard.

The new 108,000-square-foot building, which will house about 270 students, will be built by Skanska, said university spokesman Joe Kuffner. Design is by Soderstrom Architects.

Kuffner said the university is still going through the building permit phase, but demolition is cleared to start soon on the site to remove six houses the university either rented out or used for office space. Completion of the new building is planned by the end of next summer.

The new dormitory will be located next to the school’s new Beauchamp Recreation and Wellness Center, which should be complete by the time school starts in September. The $25 million project will replace the school’s aging gym.

“There will be space for a workout facility for cardio training, weight lifting and strength conditioning in the gym, and also a running track and studios for yoga and other classes,” Kuffner said.

The new residence hall will have a chapel, spacious lobby and dining concessions on the first floor with resident units on the top three floors.

Kuffner said because University of Portland is a Catholic school, run by Congregation of the Holy Cross, students are encouraged to live on campus.

“One of the big missions of the university is to have students living in a community on campus,” Kuffner said. “We want that community aspect and adding resident halls is a big push.”

Last year’s freshman class was the biggest ever, so more expansion can be expected, according to Kuffner..

In the last few years, the university has completely renovated the Clark Library, built two new dormitories, remodeled and expanded the main dining facility at Bauccio Commons as well as other projects, such as the renovation of the student lounge, the Pilot House.

Kuffner said the student lounge will be complete later in the fall and will include a pub that sells beer and wine.

“The building is well-loved, and we’re also increasing food options,” he said.

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Television executive Dick Ebersol has presented the University of Portland with a $100,000 donation to be used to help finish construction of the Beauchamp Recreation and Wellness Center on the private university’s Portland campus.

HOK and Soderstrom Architects designed the two-story, 72,270-square-foot structure, which will offer students, faculty and staff with expanded fitness areas featuring cardio machines, weights and strength stations; a climbing wall; an indoor track; a gym with three courts and studios. The design features a brick and glass facade.

General contractor Skanska is almost finished with construction. The center is slated to open in the fall.

The $23.7 million building is being paid for entirely with donor-supported money.

Ebersol, who previously served as the chairman of NBC Sports and now serves as senior adviser for NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, was the keynote speaker for a 75th anniversary celebration of the University of Portland’s Pamplin School of Business Administration in 2009.

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A new student recreation center is being erected by Skanska USA Building at the University of Portland. The Beauchamp Recreation and Wellness Center was designed by the San Francisco office of 360 Architecture (acquired by HOK earlier this year) and Portland-based Soderstrom Architects.

The design of the approximately $20 million, 72,000-square-foot facility incorporates large windows and open spaces with the goal of fostering relationships between students by putting various fitness opportunities on display. Designers incorporated the use of brick on the building’s façade in order to allow the structure to blend aesthetically with the campus’ older masonry buildings.

The new facility will include three gymnasium courts, an elevated jogging track, group fitness rooms, weight and cardio areas, locker rooms, a 32-foot rock wall, and a wellness center. Work on the project began last spring; the building is slated to open to students this fall.

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Skanska USA Building began work in late spring on the Beauchamp Recreation and Wellness Center at the University of Portland, a $23 million fitness center designed by the San Francisco office of 360 Architecture and Soderstrom Architects.

Nearly all the concrete slab on the 73,000-square-foot building has been poured, and crews will begin erecting steel by mid-September. The building will feature a rock climbing wall, three basketball courts with a suspended track hanging over them, locker rooms, and spaces for cardiovascular and weight training. The project is slated for completion in June 2015.

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Construction sometimes can be downright noisy. But contractors working near residential and commercial properties are finding ways to reduce their impact. They range from simple to high-tech, and often involve meeting with neighbors or shifting schedules.

At the Block 17 multifamily housing project in the Pearl District, Andersen Construction senior project manager Jerrod Kowalewski brought earplugs to residents at the adjacent Sitka Apartments when noise levels rose during six weeks of pile driving. Many neighbors at home during the day complained to the city that its regulations exempted pile driving from noise decibel levels, he said.

“We know it’s annoying,” he said. “We work in it, so we can empathize.”

Andersen’s project leaders returned neighbors’ phone calls and set up a Facebook page to alleviate some concerns, Kowalewski said. The company and its pile-driving subcontractor, Vancouver, Wash.-based DeWitt Construction, experimented with use of a blanket to muffle the noise, but that method proved neither safe nor effective, he said.

“If you build a wall, the sound reverberates off the wall,” he said. “If you put a pad on the hammer, it lessens the blow and takes away the energy, so you have to hit it more.”

Paul Van Orden, noise control officer for the city’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement, said Andersen did a good job of being proactive and “getting the word out” that pile driving was going to happen.

“They were pretty responsive,” he said. “They tried to notify the neighbors about the timing of their schedule. The psychology of noise is that if you know when the sound is going to happen, you usually react better. It’s a good practice.”

At the University of Portland, Skanska USA Building is using its “inSite Monitor” to detect noise, dust and vibration levels as it constructs the Beauchamp Recreation and Wellness Center close to a residence hall and on-campus housing for priests. The monitor, which the company has used elsewhere in the U.S., is connected to a tablet computer that project managers can adjust to preset limits, said Steve Clem, vice president of preconstruction.

“The monitor is linked to an app that Skanska created so we can manage it in real time,” he said. “We can adjust the monitoring levels and set them below what we’ve agreed to. If it gets close, the iPhone says we’re getting close.”

For the U.S. Bancorp Tower project in downtown Portland, the city decided that public safety would be at risk if lobby demolition were to occur during the day, so it granted an exemption for Turner Construction to perform the work at night.

That did not always sit well with guests at the Courtyard Portland City Center hotel across the street, said Len Anderson, Turner’s project superintendent. However, constant communication with the hotelier helped resolve many issues. Hotel operators would call Turner if work became too loud, and the contractor would then stop work, he said.

“It was very rare where we had to stop what we were doing,” he said. “We would say, ‘We’re going to be doing this until 10 o’clock at night – is that a problem?’ Ongoing communication was the key.”

Turner also took steps to muffle the sounds of demolition work, such as when it dropped heavy bundles of trash into an empty dumpster, Anderson said.

“An empty box magnifies the noise,” he said. “We would load it earlier in the evening where it’s not impacting people’s sleep. That muffles a lot of the noise.”

The city will likely address the construction noise issue with public hearings starting in the fall, Van Orden said. Developers, contractors and residents would be invited to discuss concerns and the costs of new, noise-reducing technology, he said.

One possibility is creating a sound shield around piles as they are driven. That approach has been found to reduce noise levels by about 10 decibels, but an additional crane is needed to create the sound shield, Van Orden said.

Also, Andersen is in discussions with city officials and residents about the possibility of using a quieter auger drill instead of a pile driver for future projects near Block 17. The challenge with using an auger drill, Van Orden said, is that it would cost about $1 million more than they spent on pile driving.

“The city will explore those options and costs,” he said. “It is hard to say what the costs are, but at a minimum, we will see if they have some applicability in Portland.”

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A multiyear, $175 million effort to update the University of Portland is wrapping up with development of a modern recreation and wellness center able to fit architecturally in the 112-year-old campus.

The San Francisco office of 360 Architecture and Portland-based Soderstrom Architects are finishing design of the $23 million, 70,000-square-foot center; university officials are hoping to break ground next May.

University officials in 2007-08 started a private fundraising campaign that garnered $105 million. After taking the effort public in 2010, officials now are just $12 million away from their goal. The money has paid for renovations or new construction of dormitories, academic engineering buildings, athletic facilities and performance halls.

“It was time,” said Laurie Kelley, interim vice president of university relations. “In order to be successful and be a university that people want to attend and give back to, you really have to be on the forefront – especially today, when people are looking at the cost of education and the value on the other end.”

The university’s existing Howard Hall recreation center was built in 1927. It features a bare-bones gymnasium, scant natural light and zero seismic stability.

“It’s kind of Hoosier-esque,” Kelley said, in reference to the film about a high school basketball team in the 1950s. “That’s not what students of 2013 want to work out in.”

The new facility will accommodate multiple uses that will be highly visible to passersby. Plans call for three gymnasium courts, an elevated jogging track, a wellness center, group fitness rooms, weight and cardio areas, locker rooms and a 32-foot-tall rock climbing wall.

Wyatt Beard, a 360 Architecture architect and the project’s designer, said the plan is to put those activities on display.

“We really want to see this building function as a beacon for the north end of the campus,” he said. “In doing so what we’re trying to do is light the building from within, and let the activities that all the students and faculty are doing within, shine through.”

The facade will incorporate large, glass windows, and openness will be a theme throughout the building. Beard said the goal is to connect various activities by breaking down the visual barriers between rooms – and perhaps people.

“When we connect different floors and activities within recreation facilities, it really helps foster relationships between students,” he said. “By creating opportunities where you can see what’s going on and learn passively, it helps encourage someone who might be less willing to go forth and try something new. It gives them the personal strength to say, ‘Hey, I think I can do this.’ ”

To incorporate the modern facility into the architectural fabric of an aged campus, 360 Architecture is collaborating with Soderstrom Architects. The Portland firm has designed numerous buildings on UP’s campus, including the Fields and Schoenfeldt residence halls that opened in 2009, and a renovation of the Clark Library.

Dan Danielson, Soderstrom Architects’ managing principal, has been working on the UP campus for the past 23 years. He said it has become more defined and traditional in that time via identifiable quads for different activities – whether academic, athletic or residential.

He said the new recreation center wants to be modern and glassy; however, many of the older buildings are made of brick. So the new design will seek to marry the two.

“Hopefully our guidance helps bridge that modernism with the contextualism of the past,” Danielson said. “It’s not easy.”

For now, he said it’s worth visiting Howard Hall today in order to compare it to the new facility in 18 months. The project is slated for completion in May 2015; Skanska is the project’s construction manager-general contractor.

“I think this is going to be an incredible addition to the campus,” Danielson said. “The students are going to be blown away.”

That’s exactly what university leaders are hoping for.

“It’s a competitive business that we’re in for students,” Kelley said. “We’re attracting the best and the brightest, and we know our competition has recreation and wellness centers like this. We always talk about the … mind, body and (spirit), and this is really that ‘body’ part, where we want our students to be healthy.”

Recent projects completed at the University of Portland include:

• Fields and Schoenfeldt halls – two new buildings, totaling 110,000 square feet, for up to 412 students; opened in 2009; approximate cost: $18.9 million.

• Shipstad Hall – a 70,000-square-foot dormitory for up to 269 students; remodeled in two phases; approximate cost: $3.75 million.

• Villa Maria Hall – a 31,000-square-foot dormitory for up to 150 students; remodeled in two phases; approximate cost: $2.52 million.

• Bauccio Commons – a 14,000-square-foot remodel/expansion (bringing it to 26,000 square feet) completed in 2009 and 2010; approximate cost: $5.87 million.

• Bell Tower addition – a 100-foot bell tower, with 14 bells ranging in size from 77 to 1,400 pounds was dedicated in 2009; approximate cost: $1.8 million.

• Donald P. Shiley Hall – 2008 renovation and expansion of 80,000-square-foot engineering building; approximate cost: $20 million.

• Chiles Center – 2012 renovation and expansion of athletic and convocation center; approximate cost: $4 million.

• Clark Library – 51,000-square-foot renovation completed in August 2013; approximate cost: $13 million.

• Don V. Romanaggi M.D. Hall – 2010 renovation of science building; approximate cost: $125,000.

• Chapel of Christ the Teacher – remodel of 6,000-square-foot chapel completed in 2013; approximate cost: $423,800.

• Clive Charles Soccer Complex – 2007 expansion and remodel of 22,300-square-foot athletic complex; approximate cost: $1.1 million.

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