Four years after design planning began on a two-building, 750,000-square-foot expansion of Oregon Health & Science University‘s growing South Waterfront campus, a grand opening was held last week to celebrate completion of the structures: the 15-story Center for Health & Healing 2 (CHH2) building, and the 11-story Gary & Christine Rood Family Pavilion.

The $360 million project was designed by ZGF Architects and built by Hoffman Construction Co. via the integrated project delivery method. Ground was broken in 2016.

The CHH2 building features nearly 400,000 square feet of ambulatory surgery and clinic space that will house 700 OHSU staffers. It is connected to the Center for Health and Healing building one block north via a two-story sky bridge over Southwest Whitaker Street. The building’s lower floors are occupied by ambulatory care, outpatient surgery and invasive procedures space, and a 24-bed outpatient care unit, while its upper floors are dedicated to Knight Cancer Institute clinic, infusion and research space. The building’s ground floor programming includes a café and retail pharmacy space. Approximately 600 patients will be seen each day in the building, which is on track to attain Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold status.

One block east, across Southwest Bond Avenue, is the Rood Family Pavilion, which features five floors of lodging and amenity space for patients and their families over six floors of parking. The extended-stay lodging space includes a 38-room Ronald McDonald House for seriously ill children and their families and 38 additional units for adult patients. It also contains communal space, including a kitchen and dining room, a fitness room, a game room and a music/multimedia room, and an expansive rooftop garden and playground.

Construction of the Rood Family Pavilion building finished in December, and patients and their families began moving in the following month. The CHH2 portion of the project wrapped on March 15, and the first patients were seen in the building on Monday. The openings come on the heels of completion in September of the Knight Cancer Research Building – another major South Waterfront project for OHSU.

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The normally bustling OHSU Center for Health and Healing South project in Portland’s South Waterfront District was much quieter than usual on Aug. 21, when Hoffman Construction mostly shut down the site for the day due to safety and material delivery concerns brought about by the solar eclipse.

A crew of about 15 workers were the only tradespeople on site at the two-building project. They were brought in to stress concrete that was poured the previous Thursday and jump concrete forms on the Rood Family Pavilion building, which will include parking and patient guest housing. The critical path work prevented the project team from losing a week on the schedule.

The site was cleared at around 10 a.m. as the eclipse began. Crews broke for an early lunch, and others from the project’s co-location office on site wandered outside to take in the event.

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A single change in the design of the Center for Health and Healing-South, now coming out of the ground in Portland’s South Waterfront District, is credited with saving Oregon Health & Science University $900,000. The move from an extruded aluminum product as a building accent to a thinner, stainless-steel plate product was actually suggested by a representative of one of the subcontractors, General Sheet Metal.

“That’s something we never would have considered, because stainless steel is a lot more expensive than aluminum,” said Kip Storey, a principal at ZGF Architects, the project’s designer. “It turned out to be great for the project and good for the design.”

According to the CHH-South project team, the change is the kind of idea that only could have come through the collaboration afforded by Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). Intended to close communication gaps and improve efficiencies on tight budgets, the alternative delivery method favored for large and complex projects has gained acceptance by the mainstream over the past decade. The team behind the CHH-South says theirs is the largest and most advanced local example of the form. But there are hazards involved with IPD, and other sectors beyond health care are moving toward it.

“Having all the owners in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, bound together to drive out waste – that’s all good,” construction attorney Brian Perlberg said. “But you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. It’s certainly not the right fit for every project.”

Great expectations

The job trailer for the CHH-South is something to behold.

The 10,000 square foot “temporary” structure is eight doublewide trailers wide with an open-plan design and enviable frontage on the Willamette River. Every wall is covered with detailed, color-coded information, though actual paper plans are in short supply. Employee nameplates show the variety of firms at work. There’s an energetic buzz across the floor.

IPD is unique in how it binds the three traditional signatories to a construction contract – the owner, architect and contractor. It’s not quite like design-build. It’s not necessarily cheap. And it’s not magic, says Perlberg, who has written sample IPD agreements for ConsensusDocs, as well as Associated General Contractors.

“It’s not a panacea,” he said. “It’s a different way of doing things, and it takes clear expectations and trust.”

IPD is seen as the best fit on large, complicated projects where the owners are interested in exploring cost savings – meaning it’s right at home in the health care field. (In fact, the first project to use an IPD contract was the Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis.) It’s also gaining appeal for higher education projects and with museums and libraries, Perlberg said.

Perlberg said the risk-averse building field is historically uncomfortable straying from low-bid, because it’s often considered the fairest method. Owners of public projects are often barred by law from using alternative delivery methods, though there are informal, non-contractual forms of IPD, known as “IPD Lite” or “IPD-ish.”

“Pure” IPD involves greater up-front costs, an issue that’s compounded on smaller projects.

“There’s a scalability issue for sure,” Perlberg said.

SAIF and sound

Currently engrossed in preconstruction, the team building SAIF Corp.‘s new headquarters in Salem is employing a modified form of IPD. Owner’s rep Day CPM, Ankrom Moisan Architects, engineer Glumac and contractor Lease Crutcher Lewis are meeting twice a week in converted surge space in the latter firm’s Portland office. Team members will relocate to a construction office near the site in Salem as the heavy work approaches.

“We’ve found for us, two, three days a week has been real effective,” said Andy Dykeman, senior project manager for Lewis Crutcher Lewis.

SAIF is attaching a five-story wing to an existing five-story building, with a goal of making it all look like one building. Move-in for SAIF is expected in summer 2018.

It’s been a new experience for Ankrom Moisan and Lease Crutcher Lewis to have the contractor and trade partners involved in design, Dykeman said. But here it led to an enriching dialogue as the architects established the building’s programmatic layout: Four stories with wider floorplates, or five stories with narrower floors? Structural steel or concrete?

Dykeman said IPD has improved communication by replacing the traditional way parties communicate on big jobs – through a never-ending cycle of highly-formal requests for information.

“This prevents all that volleying where the architect has to write something up and toss it over the net, and then we have to analyze it and toss it back over the net,” he said. “It really puts everyone on the same side of the net.”

Values judgment

The CHH-South project is a good example of full-on IPD. Occupying a full block, the project will include a 15-story hospital with more than 370,000 square feet of ambulatory surgery and clinic space and will connect underground to the bustling CHH across Southwest Whitaker Avenue.

Early on, ZGF’s and Hoffman’s experience with IPD factored into OHSU’s decision to choose them for the project, said Stephanie O’Brien, clinical enterprise liaison for OHSU.

“Not only did we think about how to improve processes to design the building, but having Hoffman as part of the design process, we began to understand what things cost,” she said. “They quickly took away the really expensive ideas to ensure we could afford the building we were trying to design.”

Design concluded in March, and permits with the city are now being finalized. Crews in the colocation trailers on the Willamette are shifting from the design phase to construction. With that shift, more ZGF designers are being recalled to their “mother ship,” as more Hoffman staffers and trade partners move in. ZGF has gone from around 30 staff on-site to about eight now, a figure it intends to keep through the duration of the project, Storey said.

“Most of the design is complete, but there are a lot of options we’re still looking at,” he said.

There’s a steep learning curve associated with IPD: smaller, less-sophisticated firms have to work hard to catch up. Teams responsible for certain components – the envelope team, for instance – must be educated.

“It’s a very different process than the traditional process, so a lot of people don’t have a whole lot of experience with it,” Storey said. “And it’s also fairly new to the industry, especially in the Portland market – and so it’s new for a lot of people, and it’s been an interesting process. … We’ve had some people who’ve took to it like a duck to water and some people that haven’t. So you’re doing a lot of educating and talking about the process to get everybody on board – but when it works, it works really well.”

The city hasn’t caught on as quickly as some subcontractors, according to the team behind the CHH-South project. In IPD, design elements are worked out during out construction, so the team often seeks building permits with incomplete designs. This project went before the Portland Design Commission five times, worrying OHSU it wouldn’t meet its goal of opening in 2018.

“To be honest, the city has made efforts to catch up, but they have not embraced the process, and they’re not really set up to do a fast-track process like this,” Storey said. “It’s much easier for them to understand a project when the project comes to them in one piece, and what we’ve asked them to do is look at it one piece at a time.”

Another advantage discussed by the project team is IPD’s edge in helping battle the twin evils of labor shortage and materials cost escalation. They say that by sharing space with key subcontractors, they’re better able to secure needed materials when they’re available, and they’re better able to administer coordinate trade partners based on their roll sheets.

Aside from gaining strength from the IPD method, the mission of the CHH-South has helped the team maximize value, said Elaine Dabrowski, senior project manager for OHSU.

“One of the things we did when we first got together is talk about what our true north is, what makes us come to work,” Dabrowski said. “And what we said is, at the end of the day when this building is done, regardless if you’re the contractor or the architect or a trade partner, you could be served in this building – you could get chemotherapy in this building. We take it back to that. This is not just a great construction project; it’s not (just) a great design project – it’s something that’s going to help all Oregonians. And that brings us together at the end of the day. It makes us trust each other.”

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As the construction of new buildings forges ahead on Oregon Health & Science University‘s South Waterfront campus, researchers are making significant gains both there and on Marquam Hill.

Jeanette Mladenovic, OHSU executive vice president and provost, noted that the university’s Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute is developing a vaccine that may someday prevent or cure HIV – the virus that causes AIDS. The research team working on the vaccine in 2014 received a $25 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; it was one of the largest philanthropic grants in OHSU’s history.

By meeting Phil Knight’s $1 billion fundraising challenge this past June, OHSU continued its ascent as a national leader in cancer research. It hopes to bolster its cancer research programs through President Obama’s request for $755 million in cancer research funding as part of his 2017 budget. Congress has already approved $195 million in research funding in 2016, which would bring total funding to nearly $1 billion over the next two years.

Mladenovic said another aspect of Obama’s research initiative is neuroscience.

“For many years, OHSU has been a leader in neurosciences,” she said. “We have built on this initiative and are about to recruit some leaders in neuroscience.”

Other research advances that have elevated OHSU as a national leader include the areas of autism and Parkinson’s disease. Its Doernbecher Children’s Hospital recently became the only children’s hospital on the West Coast to have a mobile MRI machine, allowing neurosurgeons to more precisely and safely remove most tumors in a single operation.

The growth of OHSU’s research programs means more space is needed to accommodate them. Following the success of the award-winning Collaborative Life Sciences Building & Skourtes Tower, OHSU’s South Waterfront campus will expand with the addition of the Center for Health and Healing South and the Knight Cancer Institute research building.

The $349 million Center for Health and Healing South will include a 14-story health care facility and a 10-story mixed-use building. ZGF Architects designed the development, and Hoffman Construction began building it in January.

SRG Partnership designed the $160 million Knight Cancer Institute building as a seven-story, 320,000-square-foot research facility, which will feature a commons area to the east. Another building is planned for the other half of the block five to 10 years after work on the research building wraps up.

Both buildings are scheduled for completion in July 2018.

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Two major projects that languished in the design review process for months finally received the Portland Design Commission‘s OK on Thursday.

Commissioners took only 45 minutes and imposed a few minor conditions before approving Oregon Health and Science University‘s plans for two new buildings: a 15-story surgical center with a sky bridge and a five-story guest housing tower atop a six-story parking garage at OHSU‘s Center for Health & Healing South in the South Waterfront District.

But approval for another project, a 15-story mixed-use development at Southwest Fourth Avenue and Harrison Street, came only after three hours of discussion by the commission and with many conditions, said Don Sowieja, principal with Myhre Group Architects.

Development plans call for 424 residential units above a 33,000-square-foot supermarket and 5,000 square feet of retail space at ground level. Two basement levels will provide 151 parking spaces. Myhre Group is working with the architect of record, Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture of Chicago, where the developer, Core Spaces, is also located. The site is owned by Goodman Generations LLC of Portland and Bay City Capital of San Francisco.

Sowieja said that after navigating four design advice hearings and two design review hearings in 15 months, he hopes to see construction begin soon. No start date has been set, however.

But Sowieja said he disagreed with a condition recommended by staff and approved by commissioners that clear glazing be used for all ground-level retail space facing Fourth Avenue and Harrison Street. He believes that is too restrictive and may limit the types of retail occupants.

“We had proposed something similar that was not as onerous and made our argument,” he said.

But after a sometimes heated discussion, commissioners agreed with city staffers.

“With the exception of that portion (of the hearing) it was a good meeting,” Sowieja said. “There’s always head-butting – but the majority of their (commissioners’) questions were detailed in nature.”

The city staff report recommended that the ground-floor facade on Southwest Fourth Avenue and Harrison Street “consists of clear glazed storefronts, establishing a direct visual connection between the sidewalk and the interior.”

The condition is important, city planner Staci Monroe said after the meeting, because the building faces Pettygrove Park and a pedestrian trail.

“We wanted to ensure that no back-of-house occurs along the park and trail edges in floors one and two,” she said.

Sowieja said the commissioners’ other final conditions included using metal panels with small perforations at the podium level and larger perforations at upper levels, installing landscaping instead of terraces along Southwest Third Avenue and Montgomery Street, placing a transformer below grade and setting windows at 5.5-inch deep instead of 4.5 inches in the building’s framed portion.

The design team over the past year has met with many neighborhood groups, business owners and property owners as part of the process, Sowieja said.

“We are very excited to gain approval and although the lengthy process has had its ups and downs, our team is convinced this is a wonderful project,” he said.

For the OHSU development, the Design Commission attached a few conditions. These included: changing flat metal panels on the garage to folded tri-colored metal panels, and using a marigold accent color on elevator lobbies in the guest housing building, said Brian Newman, associate vice president of planning and development at OHSU. The color matches the underside of white bird-like accents that will be featured on the parking garage facades, he said.

Newman said the project team needed 10 months – including two design advice hearings, two land use hearings and visits to Portland City Council – to get final approval from the Design Commission. One of the elements that slowed the process was the two-story sky bridge, which will cross Whitaker Avenue to connect the CHH South surgery center with the existing CHH North.

The project was approved 4-1; Commissioner Tad Savinar gave his reasons for voting no.

“I just think you’re missing the boat,” he said. “There is no wonder, there’s no discovery, there’s nothing here. The buildings are OK and for me the parking structure was an opportunity to create a ‘You’ve got to see it; let’s go there and look at the thing’ moment, but there is no human spirit here and I just can’t approve.”

Newman said he had hoped for a different response.

“I appreciate Mr. Savinar’s input and he has been very thoughtful throughout (the hearings), but I was disappointed,” Newman said. “We made so many changes to address his concerns and it was nice of him to acknowledge that we were very responsive, but I’m disappointed he couldn’t support it in the end.”

But Newman said he is thrilled that the other four votes were for approval. The process to secure building permits is under way; construction will be overseen by Hoffman Construction Co., he said.

As OHSU continues to expand its South Waterfront campus, Newman said the next building project will be the proposed Knight Cancer Research Center. The first design review hearing for that project is scheduled for April 7.

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Although staff recommended approval for Oregon Health & Science University‘s latest development on its South Waterfront campus, the Portland Design Commission set another hearing date.

Design review for the new Center for Health & Healing South, will take place Feb. 18 beginning at 12:30 p.m. – an hour earlier than usual. The hearing will be the project’s fifth appearance before the commission.

CHH South, designed by ZGF Architects, will occupy Block 29 and include a 15-story hospital with more than 370,000 square feet of ambulatory surgery and clinic space. It will connect to the existing CHH North via a two-level sky bridge over Southwest Whitaker Avenue. Plus, on the adjacent Block 28, plans call for an 11-story building with six floors of housing over four stories of parking.

Design commissioners agreed that the design of the hospital portion was acceptable, but Commission Chairman David Wark said the two projects couldn’t be approved separately.

“They need to be cohesive and relate to each other,” he said.

Much of the commissioners’ discussion focused on the exterior of the parking garage, which the residential tower overlooks.

“It is a big building, but it seems so much heavier than it needs to be,” Commissioner Tad Savinar said.

Architect David Staczek of ZGF said determining the right exterior for the parking garage was the design team’s biggest challenge. He suggested creating artwork – perhaps a grid of perforated metal panels that would emulate flocks of birds. He said that would be appropriate because Portland is on the Pacific Flyway (bird migratory path), and that several artists were being considered.

At the end of the meeting, Wark said that the team needed to address the composition of the garage exterior as well as the heaviness of the housing and the need for more glazing.

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A two-block development by Oregon Health and Science University will have to come back next month for a fourth appearance in front of the Portland Design Commission, and time is of the essence.

Design commissioners have asked the project team from ZGF Architects to return for the Feb. 4 review armed with a small three-dimensional model of the proposed two-building project as well as detailed answers to several design concerns.

The design review is for two buildings on the OHSU South Waterfront campus on Southwest Bond Avenue. The first is a 15-story, 378,000-square-foot hospital and clinic building to be called Center for Health and Healing South. It will be connected to CHH North by a sky bridge over Whitaker Avenue.

Across Bond Street from CHH South will be an 11-story building with six floors of guest residences over a four-story parking garage.

For OHSU, the sooner the design review for the two buildings is finished, the better.

“The reason we wanted to come back so quickly is so we can keep it on schedule,” OHSU spokesman Brian Newman said after the meeting. “It’s such a unique program and it raises some unique questions. It’s easy to come away (from review meetings) with a negative because that’s their focus. But there’s been so much positive on 90 percent of the project, we just have to focus on these few remaining issues.”

Newman said he hopes the new facilities will open in 2018 because their timely development is critical to the future of OHSU.

“We are creating a new kind of facility that doesn’t exist,” he said. “Half of our patients come from outside the Portland area, which is why we included housing.”

At the design review meeting on Thursday, city planner Tim Heron said staff still has concerns about certain aspects of the two buildings, specifically activating building corners, parking garage screening, location of patient drop off and lack of detail for signage.

LENGTHY DISCUSSION

Commissioners had a lengthy discussion on a new design for the patient drop off area at CHH South on Southwest Curry Street, which ultimately seemed to get their approval.

David Staczek, architect with ZGF Architects, said the design team felt having the patient drop off on Curry Street was the best choice. He presented commissioners with a new design that cuts back the corners of the building near the covered drop off point. The drop-off area, he said, will be 16 feet tall and 35 feet wide with a 24-foot drive lane as well as sidewalk and pedestrian zones.

“It opens the corners and the building mass steps down to (Caruthers Park),” Staczek said. “The canted walls and grade give it a more open feel and allow more sunlight.”

Kurt Krueger, development review manager with the Portland Bureau of Transportation, told the commissioners that dropping off patients on Southwest Curry was the best option.

“We would like to use Whitaker, and Curry would be better if it was one-way eastbound,” he said.

Not everyone agreed. Commissioner Tad Savinar said he preferred the previous design and Commission Chair David Wark said carving back the corners “erodes the impact” of the architecture of the building.

But Commissioner Jeff Simpson said the new design creates more openness in an enclosed area.

“I like it better than going around corners,” he said. “I understand this solution.”

Activating the corners of the residential building was also talked about at length at the four-hour hearing.

Commissioners heard proposals for moving two of the stairwells of the residence hall away from the corners to allow for more active corners. The current design suggests recessed panels to hold artwork, but Commissioner Don Vallaster said he would rather see a more activity at the corners.

‘TACKY AND COLD’

Commissioners also discussed the metallic finish of the building, which Simpson called “tacky and cold.”

“I appreciate the steps made on your previous proposal and more than appreciate this extremely sophisticated skin,” he said. “But it’s cold for the neighborhood and intimidating to go into.”

After the meeting, Newman said Simpson’s statement was “a bit of a surprise” and said it might be because Simpson had not been at previous reviews of the project.

“We didn’t do enough to share our interiors and how transparent they are,” Newman said. “We have good materials and color palette and probably didn’t do enough to share with him on the interiors.”

Despite concerns, city planner Heron said the complex design of the two buildings was moving in the right direction and good progress had been made since the last review.

According to city documents, the new CHH South will act as an extension of CHH North, which has seven operating rooms. CHH South will add 10 more operating rooms. The building will house the Knight Cancer Institute, medical suites and offices.

CHH South will connect to the residential hall and parking garage through an underground utility tunnel at the second level of the existing garage for passage of materials and services.

On Block 28, the 11-story patient housing and parking garage structure will include more than 340,000 square feet. The ground floor will house a neighborhood urgent care clinic, a guest housing lobby, a conference center, a loading dock and support functions.

Guest housing will be in a four-story tower extending above the parking garage and overlooking a 60,000-square-foot green roof with a children’s play area on top of the garage roof at the sixth-floor level. The top four floors will have 76 rooms and support. The parking garage will provide 687 spaces on the second through sixth floors.

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Though Oregon Health & Science University first settled at Marquam Hill nearly 100 years ago to escape the rapid development of Portland, the university is now fully invested in pushing back in.

OHSU is the city’s largest employer, and today controls one 116-acre main campus on Marquam Hill, an 8-acre South Waterfront campus, and a 20-acre parcel (donated by the Schnitzer family) to the north. Following the opening of the Collaborative Life Sciences Building at the new “Schnitzer campus” last year, OHSU has three more buildings in the design process.

In a month, shovels should hit the ground on the $349 million, two-building Center for Health & Healing South. And next year, public hearings will focus on the $160 million Knight Cancer Research Building – an ambitious 320,000-square-foot research facility slated for construction slightly north of the new Skourtes Tower on Southwest Moody Avenue.

The route the research university has taken to expand would likely have surprised its founders, according to Brian Newman, OHSU’s head of campus planning, development and real estate. He spoke this week at the Construction Specifications Institute‘s monthly meeting.

“Of course, reality gets in your way … It shows you how challenging it is to implement original plans,” he said, citing Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, which straddles a canyon on the hill.

Newman talked about OHSU’s plans for continued growth into the South Waterfront District – an area that has long vexed planners. Bounded by Interstate 5, it’s somewhat cut off from the rest of the city, despite geographic closeness. As the longtime home of shipbuilding and scrapping activities, much of the soil there contains toxins, so additional layers of governmental review are required. Plus, many outdated buildings around the campus are considered historic, which further limits what designers can do.

“Tearing down anything is a great challenge,” Newman said. “Many buildings are sitting empty right now.”

OHSU today employs about 12,600 people, and has approximately 2,500 students enrolled in its medical, dental, nursing and engineering science programs as well as 1,000 enrolled in training programs. Though envisioned as an “acropolis on a hill” when it opened in 1919, OHSU was only a few decades old when it started running out of room. Because of engineering challenges from the geography on and around Marquam Hill – construction of one building required pumping concrete uphill several hundred feet – OHSU’s master plan targets the South Waterfront for expansion.

Along with enormous private donations from some of Oregon’s wealthiest families and individuals, more than $600 million in public money has gone into development of infrastructure in the district. Improvements include the new MAX orange line, expanded streetcar service, extensions of Bond and Moody avenues, the Darlene Hooley pedestrian crossing, and the controversial aerial tram that runs from Marquam Hill to the South Waterfront campus.

The Center for Health & Healing reflects a trend in health care toward more short-term care, Newman said. The new South complex will feature two buildings on adjacent blocks, with a tunnel linking them below Southwest Bond Avenue. Five floors of the Block 28 building will serve as an ambulatory hospital facility, dedicated to invasive surgeries and outpatient care. Above it, the Knight Cancer Research Building will have lab space. Plans for the other building, Block 29, call for conference facilities, above-ground parking and five floors of subsidized temporary housing for OHSU’s many out-of-town patients.

Hoffman Construction, the general contractor for the Center for Health & Healing South, has been under contract for about a year. Project managers have spent many hours in joint meetings with ZGF Architects and a varied group of stakeholders and consultants. ZGF even hired nurses to advise the project team and convinced doctors to attend team meetings.

More goes into preconstruction than people might think, Hoffman Vice President Bart Eberwein said.

“OHSU I would put in the category of ‘enlightened owner,’ ” he said. “So they hire the designer and the contractor concurrently, and we jointly design what the project looks like – everybody in the room is talking about what would make a better medical office building. The feeling is that the more voices that are there, the better the outcome.”

The Knight Cancer Research Building, named for donors Phil and Penny Knight, would house under one roof all operations of the Knight Cancer Institute, which currently occupies four buildings on Marquam Hill. The building is planned as a seven-story research facility, with a commons to the east. Another building is planned for the other half of the block, likely five to 10 years after construction of the Knight Cancer Research Building. Type III design review plans were submitted to the Portland Design Commission this month, with public hearings expected to take place next year.

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Oregon Health and Science University will only get one of the two sky bridges it asked the Portland Design Commission to approve related to a two-building project on Southwest Bond Street. The requested second sky bridge will be replaced by a tunnel.

The sky bridge and tunnel will be part of a $340 million project that includes construction of the Center for Health and Healing South, which will be a 12-story, 360,000-square-foot outpatient clinic, and a 10-story, 264,000-square-foot mixed use building for primarily for patient housing.

The double-decker single sky bridge was unanimously recommended for approval by the Portland Design Commission last week, said Brian Newman, OHSU associate vice president of campus planning, development and real estate. The design of the bridge will go to the city engineer before moving to the City Council for final approval. ZGF Architects is the designer of the OSHU expansion project.

The sky bridge, which will stretch over Whitaker Street, will connect the third and fourth floors of the proposed clinic and the existing Center for Healing and Health North building, Newman said. The sky bridge mainly will be used to transfer surgery patients back and forth between operating and recovery rooms in both buildings.

“It will be the main connection for patients on gurneys, primarily a surgical connection,” he said.

The tunnel will connect the Center for Health and Healing South building, which will be built on an existing underground parking garage, and the new patient housing building.

The tunnel will be used to move materials only. Patients will move between the housing building and CHH South via the street.

“Those patients are going to housing, and they’re ambulatory,” Newman said.

The proposed Center for Health and Healing South will cover a full city block bounded by Southwest Whitaker and Curry streets and Moody and Bond avenues. The patient housing building will be built on an existing parking lot bounded by Whitaker and Curry streets and Bond Avenue and River Parkway. The patient housing building will have retail space and a conference center on the ground floor, one level of below-grade parking, and above-grade parking on the second through fifth floors.

Sky bridges have been generally frowned on by the city in the past because they discourage pedestrian traffic. However, OHSU made a strong case for an exception, according to Newman.

“The big news is that they (the Design Commission) unanimously supported the remaining sky bridge,” he said. “That was the biggest hurdle.”

Newman said that in the comments part of the Design Committee’s review, it was stated that the city “still sets a very high bar for sky bridges.”

City staffers in April told the Design Commission that requests to build sky bridges in Portland are rare and must get special City Council approval.

Kurt Krueger of the Portland Bureau of Transportation told the commission that city policies on sky bridges have not been updated in years, with the last report published in 1982.

Newman said that OHSU will make a formal land use application for the sky bridge with the city in the second week of September.

OHSU originally had planned to start building construction in May 2016. Now, that work could begin sooner, according to Newman.

“Now that we are doing the tunnel, construction can start earlier, in January of next year,” he said, instead of May of 2016, as originally planned.

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A proposed expansion to Oregon Health & Science University‘s Center for Health & Healing in the South Waterfront could face an uphill battle to gain city approval because of plans to build sky bridges.

The Portland Design Commission last week during a design advice hearing for the project criticized the proposed sky bridges and an above-grade parking garage included in the research hospital’s plans for two new buildings directly south of the existing Center for Health & Healing, at 3303 S.W. Bond St. Commissioners told the ZGF Architects design team the sky bridges and parking structure would negatively impact the pedestrian experience.

“I don’t for a second doubt the need for parking,” Commissioner Tad Savinar said. “Sky bridges and five floors of parking structure are intensive in terms of their impact on the urban environment. My guess is you’ll have to make your case that this is a betterment, how it makes your experience on the street better.”

Project plans call for a 12-story, 360,000-square-foot outpatient clinic, the Center for Health & Healing South, constructed on top of existing underground parking on full block bounded by Southwest Whitaker and Curry streets and Moody and Bond avenues.

Clinic parking and patient housing would be located in an adjacent 10-story, 264,000-square-foot, mixed-use building that would be constructed on an existing surface parking lot bounded by Whitaker and Curry Streets and Bond Avenue and River Parkway. The proposed mixed-use building would have retail space and a conference center on the ground floor, one level of below-grade parking, above-grade parking on the second through fifth floors, and five floors of housing for patients who traveled to the clinic from outside the Portland-metro area.

Initial project designs calls for two sky bridges. A two-story sky bridge would pass over Whitaker Street to connect the third and fourth floors of the proposed clinic to the existing Center for Health & Healing. The second single-story sky bridge would go over Bond Avenue to connect the fourth floors of the two new buildings.

City staffers told the Design Commission that proposals to build sky bridges in Portland are rare and require special Portland City Council approval. The structures are generally frowned upon in the city’s design guidelines, city planner Kara Fioravanti told the commission.

Kurt Krueger with the Portland Bureau of Transportation said he generally talks developers out of building sky bridges, but city policies regarding the structures have not been updated in years. The last city report that discourages the development of sky bridges was published in 1982, he said.

“We have not touched a sky structure in probably 12 or 13 years,” Krueger said. “We’re dealing with a sky bridge in the South Waterfront, and in 1982 the South Waterfront didn’t exist in the way it does today.”

Brian Newman, OHSU associate vice president of campus planning, development and real estate, told the Design Commission the sky bridge over Moody Avenue would provide swift passage for cancer patients between treatment areas and housing. The proposed sky bridge over Whitaker Street would be primarily used to transport patients between operating rooms and labs and imaging facilities that would spread out between the existing Center for Health & Healing and the proposed southern addition, he said.

“The challenge as we grow our services is to be as efficient as possible,” Newman said. “When patients leave the operating room they are extremely vulnerable. As I read the (city) encroachment policy, it’s about keeping what should be on the street on the street. We’re not putting anything on those sky bridges that would normally be on the street.”

An alternative would be to transport patients underneath the building, but that would require them to pass through the existing below-grade parking garage. This would be a longer trip and not ideal for those with compromised immune systems, he said.

ZGF principal David Staczek said the design team planned to make the sky bridges feel unobtrusive to the street below by using lots of glass.

“Our goals are to be light, bright and transparent,” he said.

The proposed above-ground parking garage would be treated similarly and screening aimed to make it appear more attractive to passerby, Staczek said.

“We’re looking at an elegant solution of screening materials,” he said.

One reason why OHSU officials decided to pursue an above-grade parking structure was because the Center for Health & Healing’s existing below-grade parking structure is prone to flooding with ground water, Newman said. Water is regularly pumped out the three levels of underground parking even in the summer months, he said.

“It has been a challenge operationally, much greater than we anticipated,” Newman said.

Commission Chairman David Wark suggested that wrapping housing around the parking structure would enliven the street more than screens. He also didn’t like the idea of locating the vehicle drop-off for the proposed outpatient clinic on Southwest Curry Street across from the Caruthers Park.

“When I looked at this proposal, I was a bit stunned,” Wark said. “The drop off across from the public park, the 75 feet of parking garage and the sky bridges, to me, there are ways to diminish all of those.”

Commissioner Guenevere Millius said a series of sky bridges like OHSU has on its Marquam Hill campus wouldn’t be appropriate in the South Waterfront. The Center for Health & Healing South should take more cues from OHSU’s nearby Collaborative Life Sciences Building and Skourtes Tower, she said.

“I understand the need for a sky bridge for the medically fragile, but everybody else they can go on the street,” Millus said. “I’m hoping that the balance of what happens from an urban design perspective that it’s more like what’s going on at the Skourtes (Tower) versus the hill.”

Commission Co-Chairman Ben Kaiser was among other commissioners who encouraged the design team to ensure the two new buildings looked distinct from the existing Center for Health & Healing.

“It would be unfortunate if this campus grew to have all the buildings look the same,” he said.

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