With a mouthful of spiky teeth the Genesis Attachments truly conjures up an image of the prehistoric past.

Once attached to the arm of an excavator, the tool is designed to tear apart concrete buildings piece by piece. And it recently wound up becoming the focus of a wide-ranging art project involving many people from Multnomah County.

As part of Turner Construction‘s ongoing $10 million demolition of Oregon Health & Science University‘s former 140,000-square-foot dental school, Tigard company Northwest Demolition & Dismantling has used a Razer decorated as a ferocious dinosaur to help bring a smile to the young patients next door at the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.

“That’s the idea; that’s why I got involved,” said Marsh Burns, owner of Twin Lakes Jag, a Troutdale custom auto shop.

Burns is responsible for painting a lifelike dinosaur head around the green-clad frame of the Razer tool. He used a paint scheme designed over two months by Damascus seventh-grader Gavin Cook.

“They brought it to me and I just transferred it to paint,” Burns said with a chuckle. “I showed up one day and started going crazy. I got kind of scared when it came to life; I thought it was going to bite me.”

The reptilian tool was put in service a month ago. As work progresses, hospital patients are able to watch the monstrous figure bite down on support columns, floors and other parts of the 62-year-old building. also has been brought online by Northwest Demolition & Dismantling.

The demolition project began early last year and is set to finish with site clearance in August. Then a planned $45 million expansion of the Casey Eye Institute will be carried out, with the remainder of the property poised to accommodate hospital expansion.

Until then, however, the bright green Razer tool will stay busy entertaining those who watch it work.

Ben Wright is the superintendent on the job for Northwest Demolition & Dismantling. Because of the proximity to the children’s hospital, he said, the company wanted to go out of its way to make its patients smile.

“We’re right there next to Doernbecher, and as part of our proposal for the construction at the hospital, we just wanted to just find some stuff to do,” Wright said. “We asked, ‘What can we do for the kids?’”

Brainstorming resulted in a conceptual dinosaur head. From there, a series of personal connections between the company and its suppliers, as well as Burns and Cook, helped bring the idea to life.

“We kind of thought of a few things where (Doernbecher kids) can be involved,” Wright said. “It’s just something nice for the kids to see while it’s going on; they enjoy watching the equipment work.”

While Burns once restored a 1956 Oldsmobile police cruiser for the Gresham Police Department, he’s never taken on such a unique volunteer project before, he said.

“There’s nothing like it,” Burns said when asked about previous volunteer work. “I’ve done some charitable stuff, but not like that.”

Cook, 13, lives in Damascus, slightly south of Gresham city limits. He designed the scaly beast now adorning the Razer last summer, with little more than previous experience sketching hot rods and luxury cars for fun.

Once Cook’s design was finished in September and gained corporate approval, the plans were sent to Burns to finish the project at the shop where he restores classic cars. It proved the perfect spot to decorate the Razer in a sophisticated, scaly pattern, complete with white teeth and glowing yellow eyes.

“We called it all sorts of things – the claw, the dinosaur, the big claw,” Burns said. “That thing will shear a 12-inch I-beam at 110 feet in the air; it’s just made for demolition.”

Wright said a contact at PacWest Machinery, the company that sold Northwest Demolition & Dismantling the Razer tool, helped facilitate connections between Cook, Burns and the OHSU project in the first place. By Jan. 1, pretty much everything was in place and the newly decorated Razer was ready to go to work.

“It was a collaborative effort between everybody,” Wright said. “Then we all got involved with Marsh and Gavin, and it’s kind of a cool deal.”

Cook showed some of the early sketches of his design, and talked last week about his first high-profile work.

“He (Burns) had an original concept of what he wanted,” Cook said. “He gave us the color formula and then we basically took that and went from there. It’s mainly just modeled after a velociraptor or T-Rex type of thing; there are characteristics from both. We worked together on it.”

It was a painstaking – and sometimes painful – job.

“I took a bunch of (sketches) and started going crazy on them,” Cook said. “It took a few tries, I will admit that.”

The final drawing was converted to a digital format so the dimensions and color could be mapped. That was the hardest aspect of the project, Cook added. But it nonetheless has him pondering a future in commercial art, graphic design or a similar field.

“I’m not used to drawing those types of things,” he said. “Just working in it showed me so many open doors that would make a huge difference.”

A slow go

The two-year demolition process is roughly half-finished, with the interior gutted first. The slow pace of work is caused by the use of the old building as a retaining wall for a portion of Southwest Campus Drive. The plan is to keep the back wall in place as the rest of the building is removed. But this is a long process that started with the dental school moving in 2014 to the Collaborative Life Sciences Building. It will conclude later this year when the site is cleared and preparations begin for new construction.

“This is not your routine demolition project,” project manager Lee Weidman said in an OSHU School of Dentistry blog post prior to the start of demolition. “You can’t collapse the building without retaining the hillside. We are working through options that would allow us to strengthen that wall so that once the building is gone the existing back wall will be strong enough to keep the hillside where it belongs.”

Crews that dismantled the interior of the building arguably had an even more difficult task in preparing the superstructure for demolition, Northwest Demolition & Dismantling superintendent Ben Wright said.

“It’s definitely more of a challenge for the guys prior to us,” he said.

The post Demolition with Jurassic flair appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Oregon Health and Science University has signed its latest round of master contracts with the local offices of four national construction firms.

The contracts cover sustaining work valued between $100,000 and $5 million at OHSU‘s Marquam campus and its Schnitzer campus in the South Waterfront area.

The selected firms are Hoffman Construction, Skanska, Mortenson Construction and Fortis Construction.

Fortis and Mortenson are new to the list. They replace Turner Construction and InLine Construction (party to a joint venture with Andersen Construction) on the list.

OHSU issued a request for proposals this past spring and received 12 “very strong proposals,” according to Jennifer Taylor, OHSU’s director of design and construction.

OHSU now controls more than $500 million dollars in ongoing construction projects: the $190 million Knight Cancer Research Building, the $360 million second phase of the Center for Health and Healing South, the $45 expansion of the Casey Eye Institute and the $10 million demolition and hazardous materials abatement of the former School of Dentistry building.

The post OHSU signs new round of master contracts appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

While a half-billion dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art construction work for Oregon Health and Science University buzzes in Portland’s South Waterfront District, another highly technical project on OHSU‘s Marquam Hill campus involves building a building in reverse.

Turner Construction‘s $10 million demolition of the 140,000-square-foot former OHSU School of Dentistry is complicated by tons and tons of hazardous materials, geotechnical considerations with campus-wide implications, and a highly sensitive workplace environment.

“Much bigger buildings have been demo’d before,” said Brian Newman, vice president of campus development at OHSU. “But because of its setting and a mandate to keep the campus operating and put patient and visitor safety first, it’s a highly complex demolition.”

OHSU is in the process of demolishing the former educational building on Southwest Campus Drive. The dentistry school relocated to the Collaborative Life Sciences Building in 2014 as part of a larger goal of moving some OHSU education programs to the growing Schnitzer campus in the South Waterfront District.

Tearing down the former dentistry school building has two purposes. One is to expand the Casey Eye Institute into a new five-story building that will take up about one-third of the property formerly occupied by the dentistry school. The other purpose is to prep the remaining two-thirds of the property for hospital expansion.

Several factors complicate the effort. For one, the dentistry school building was built at the height of asbestos use in construction, and all of that material must be slowly and carefully abated. After approximately six months of work, that effort is nearly completed. The next six months will involve shoring and structural work, including adding steel tiebacks to the hillside. The reason is that the existing building is deeply embedded in the hill and, on the opposite side, helping hold up Campus Drive.

“So before we just tear out the building, we have to do lots of work to support the hillside and to support Campus Drive,” Newman said.

The shoring work is expected to wrap in late September, which is when visitors to the campus would be able to start seeing the building come down. But don’t expect a swinging wrecking ball – the actual demolition is contracted to be done in a slow, controlled process, Newman said.

By August 2018, the site will be cleared and ready for the $45 million Casey Eye Institute expansion. That project will add 50,000 to 60,000 square feet to serve in particular the Elks Children’s Eye Clinic at the eye institute. The project also involves adding space for the institute’s genetics and retina programs, as well as some imaging space.

It’s OHSU’s first project designed by Seattle-based architecture firm NBBJ. Skanska is the general contractor.

All the work led to another change at OHSU. Like many large institutional owners, OHSU has used project management firms to serve as owner’s representatives and shepherd projects. But to oversee the current capital campaign, OHSU has staffed up with around a half-dozen project managers for the South Waterfront work alone. Keeping project management talent in-house will help OHSU retain expertise and institutional memory, Newman said.

“So, as long as we have a major project every couple years, we can do this,” he said. “We don’t know that it will always be the case – there could always be a recession. But that’s a risk anyways, right?”

The newly formed “Major Projects Team,” led by Bill Bowen, joins approximately 45 employees in OHSU’s Campus Development division.

Ongoing OHSU projects

Knight Cancer Research Building: $190 million

Center for Health and Healing South phase II:  $360 million

Casey Eye Institute expansion: $45 million

School of Dentistry demolition: $10 million

The post Crews handle OHSU demolition project with care appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.