For Ben Kaiser’s latest project in North Portland, the developer and architect drew upon influences as far away as Japan and as close to home as family.

The Canyons will open later this month at 3450 N. Williams Ave., near the intersection with Northeast Fremont Street. The 70-unit apartment building is intended to serve seniors seeking independent living units with convenient services.

Behind the six-story, 65-foot-tall building is a long, low-slung retail structure that creates an alleyway with the taller residential building. Kaiser expects a sushi restaurant, hair salon and salt retailer to open there after completion.

The project was designed before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but landed on a series of fortuitous choices with the help of partner Emily Dawson. For example, each unit has its own heating and cooling system, and does not share air with other spaces. Also, the corridors are open to outdoor air, and units are staggered in a sawtooth pattern so doors do not face each other.

“We weren’t planning on COVID, but we’re very happy with the outcome,” Kaiser said during a recent tour of the property. “It’ll be a post-COVID environment that’s safe.”

The property will also have 24-hour concierge and occasional visits from Metro West Ambulance medics for residents who want blood pressure checks or other minor medical screenings.

In a brief video on The Canyons website, Kaiser talks about the past search for ideal housing for his aging father. That influenced development of the building.

“The products here in the United States need a lot of work,” Kaiser said. “It’s either super expensive or practically uninhabitable. We’re trying to find the middle ground.”

The units do not have bathtubs, but do have unique features such as countertops that can be raised and lowered.

also has cross-laminated timber – a material heralded by Kaiser Group and Path Architecture. The Canyons shares a parcel with the team’s Carbon 12, which opened in 2018 and remains, for now, the tallest CLT building in the United States. For The Canyons, the team brought on R&H Construction, a local firm that had not previously built a CLT structure.

The innovative method of joining the CLT drew some initial skepticism from inspectors, said Iain Macdonald, executive director of the Tallwood Design Institute – a collaborative effort of Oregon State University, the University of Oregon and industry partners based in Corvallis. The CLT panels are connected to each other instead of to a beam or a wall.

“We did actually some testing for them because the building code guys had never seen CLT connected in that way before,” Macdonald said.

CLT panels were loaded up with concrete barriers to test the material’s hardiness. The wood panels passed with ease, Macdonald said.

“We used every piece of concrete we had in the lab,” he said. “It was a really pretty dramatic illustration of the strength of it.”

CLT for The Canyons came from Structurlam, a major manufacturer based in British Columbia.

Portland has been a leading U.S. market for CLT, with Kaiser among its earliest adopters. Developers and architects who have used CLT praise its warm aesthetics, lower carbon footprint compared to concrete, ability to meet fire and seismic codes, and connection to rural Oregon’s timber economy.

The Canyons is on track to hit its $36 million budget, Kaiser said. The project team was forced to pause twice during the pandemic because of COVID-19 cases, he noted.

As a development proposition, The Canyons – a rental product aimed at the middle of the market – complements Carbon 12, which has for-sale luxury condos. The retail buildings create a narrow alleyway with both The Canyons and Carbon 12, something Kaiser said was inspired by Japan’s dense, lively alleyways.

“Our hope is people fill in all through here,” he said.

Hoosiers, a Japanese company, is a partner in the project.

The building has substantial bike parking, but approximately 30 parking spaces are tucked underneath. Seniors still want motor vehicle parking, Kaiser said.

“It’s still definitely a market that requires parking citywide,” he said.

Interest from potential commercial tenants has picked up as Oregon gets a better grasp on the coronavirus pandemic, Kaiser said.

“We’re all learning how to live with this problem, and business is slowly coming out of its shell,” he said.

Any new development in the Eliot neighborhood – historically one of Portland’s Black community centers – brings uncomfortable questions of gentrification and displacement. Kaiser has been having those conversations with residents and business owners for many years. Some still don’t like him or his developments, he admitted, but it’s a conversation he knows is necessary.

“Our country is going through a long-overdue awakening to the injustices of Black families in this country,” he said. “The diversity of this quadrant is what I love the most.”

Kaiser first purchased the property and began developing ideas for it before the Great Recession. The economic collapse halted those plans. The recovery led to Carbon 12. The property was vacant at the time of purchase.

“We haven’t displaced anything,” he said. “We haven’t torn down homes; we haven’t torn down businesses. That’s not to say Williams (Avenue)-Vancouver (Avenue) doesn’t have a horrible history of gentrification.”

Kaiser said he supports debt forgiveness for Black Americans.

“What our country needs now more than ever is open discourse to alleviate this massive disparity,” he said.

Kaiser Group is not done with the area, either. The developer owns an adjacent parcel east of The Canyons. The property is approximately 6,000 square feet and zoned for residential use.

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Next to Carbon 12, an eight-story mass-timber mixed-use building in North Portland, the Kaiser Group and PATH Architecture are sticking with wood.

The Canyons, at the corner of North Williams Avenue and Ivy Street, will also feature cross-laminated timber (CLT). It will be six stories and offer market-rate apartments as well as substantial commercial space. But The Canyons won’t be a carbon copy.

“It’s a different type of structure,” said project architect Emily Dawson of PATH Architecture. “This is much more like a conventional multifamily project where we don’t have a post-and-beam structure like a lot of the CLT projects going on right now.”

R&H Construction is the general contractor for The Canyons. Crews broke ground in February on what will eventually be a 65-foot-tall building with 70 residential units. In total, there will be 110,000 square feet of floor space. It is designed for seniors, but there won’t be an age restriction. The team sought to offer physically accessible accommodations within a vibrant urban environment. Light-filled apartments will have open floor plans and modern designs. Plus, a resident paramedic will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Then there’s the unique open-air Alleywalk marketplace that will feature two separate buildings with several small businesses. These micro-retail spaces will range from 250 to 420 square feet.

Also, officials are working to establish partnerships with Legacy Health, New Seasons Market and others to help residents save on dining and health care costs.

The project is designed in part around the concept of intergenerational living. To that end, the team hopes to attract a Montessori school or a similar tenant.

On the design and engineering front, Dawson noted, there have been plenty of lessons learned from PATH Architecture’s experience with Carbon 12 to apply to The Canyons. While both buildings use CLT floor panels (fabricated by British Columbia-based Structurlam), there are more differences than similarities between them. Carbon 12, for instance, features a structural steel core, while The Canyons is being built more or less as a conventional building with a post-tensioned concrete podium.

One unique use of CLT panels in The Canyons will be in an interior atrium structure that links all five stories of apartments through the building’s open-air center. Zigzagging walkways on each floor will bounce from entryway to entryway along the length of the building. Those CLT walkways will be supported by other panels, but at skewed angles to form a never-before-seen load-bearing structure.

To obtain a final building permit, Dawson and her team had the walkway design tested by the Tallwood Design Institute at Oregon State University.

“Because they sit along each corridor wall, but sit at this kind of skewed angle, it creates what is called torsional shear through the panel,” Dawson said. “It’s shear moving through the panel in a way that we don’t have tested values that we can pull from charts.”

Under guidelines in Chapter 17 of the state building code, an exact copy of the atrium design was fabricated and sent to the Tallwood Design Institute lab for load-bearing tests. The results showed the design could bear at least three times its intended structural load – the lab ran out of weight to add after roughly 60,000 pounds.

“Our panels recovered to the level at which it passed the two-times test,” Dawson said. “Even when we took it to three times, we actually tried to break the panel but we couldn’t get it to failure.”

Crews from R2M2 Rebar & Stressing and Marion Construction are working below grade to construct the building’s underground parking structure, foundation and core.

“We are pouring structural concrete in the basement right now,” said Adam Peterson, senior project manager for R&H Construction. “Work on most of our foundations are complete. We are working on columns and walls, and right now we’re trending a little bit ahead of schedule. We will be in structural concrete through summer and starting wood framing in September and then the CLT will go up quite quickly.”

Cross-laminated timber offers multiple benefits, Dawson said.

“The first thing was the schedule advantages and ease of construction and lack of complications,” she said. “The second is the look; people just really love being in those spaces. It looks really beautiful and it feels so good to have that exposed wood. So, we see that as a differentiator on the market, and as a building owner it was really important to us.”

Completion is scheduled for fall 2020.

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PATH Architecture is expanding its use of cross-laminated timber to include a new senior living center at 3450 N. Williams Ave. When completed in 2019, The Canyons will be a 110,000-square-foot mixed-use structure next to developer’s Kaiser Group‘s Carbon 12.

“We have been working in mass-timber products for five years and we have learned a hell of a lot,” said Ben Kaiser, owner of PATH Architecture and Kaiser Group. “We keep moving the needle. We are pretty comfortable with CLT and how it works.”

One of the big advantages of using CLT in a senior living structure is that the panels help moderate moisture in the air.

In wintertime, the panels release moisture, which helps relieve dry air conditions that can hamper elderly residents’ breathing. Then in summertime, the panels absorb moisture.

The panels will include sensors able to detect exactly how much moisture they are absorbing or releasing.

“Studies have shown it’s a healthier environment,” Kaiser said. “The sensors will have a 13-year battery life. So for 13 years, we can read the moisture levels in the panels on an iPad. We will be able to see if there is a leak. That is fantastic to have in any building.”

The decision to use CLT as the primary construction material is one of the primary reasons for the $21 million price tag. Nevertheless, Kaiser sought to use an environmentally sustainable product.

“For me, at this point in my career, it’s about reversing the carbon footprint of construction,” he said. “I think the objective is to think beyond the immediate costs.”

Project developers have also added 10 units from the original plan formed two years ago.

“It has evolved,” said Jennifer Dillan, a spokeswoman with Kaiser Group. “One thing this project does is build on a series of unique partnerships.”

Those partnerships include one with New Seasons Market. Residents at The Canyons will be able to order from the market ready-made meals that can be delivered. A top goal of the project is to allow seniors to stay as independent as possible for as long as possible.

“This is not assisted-living level of care,” Kaiser said. “We designed an alley on the back of The Canyons. The elder folks will be able to go to an active retail corridor.”

This is Kaiser’s first foray into senior living structures. As such, he brought in Hoosiers Corporation as a partner. The Tokyo-based company has built numerous elder living structures in Japan. In return for sharing its expertise building elder housing, Hoosiers Corp. is getting firsthand experience using CLT, which is becoming more popular in Asia.

“They want to know about CLT and we want to learn about elder housing,” Kaiser said. “It’s a good match.”

The Canyons’ residential units will have a mid-price point, Kaiser said. A driving force in the effort to ensure costs wouldn’t be too high was the experiences he had with his own father.

“My siblings and I toured places,” Kaiser said. “The options for people who are not wealthy were not very good. They were all extremely expensive or so bad we would never put our parent there. We are trying to find a middle ground. We want to build something that is affordable but still a good place to live.”

R&H Construction has been chosen as the general contractor. Ground is expected to be broken in September and a grand opening is scheduled for December 2019.

On the Boards is a 91��Ƶ feature offering a look at the projects in Oregon being tackled by local architecture firms. To have your firm’s projects considered, contact 91��Ƶ architecture and engineering reporter Kent Hohlfeld at 503-802-7224 or khohlfeld@djcOregon.com.

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